The Silence of the Archive 9781783301577, 9781783301553

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Thomas Silence of the Archives 1st stage correction 3 April 20/04/2017 15:10 Page i

THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVE

Thomas Silence of the Archives 1st stage correction 3 April 20/04/2017 15:10 Page ii

Other titles in the Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives series (Series Editor: Geoffrey Yeo) Archives: principles and practices, 2nd edition by Laura A. Millar ISBN 978-1-78330-206-2 Community Archives: the shaping of memory, by Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander (eds) ISBN 978-1-85604-639-8 Management Skills for Archivists and Records Managers, by Louise Ray and Melinda Haunton (eds) (forthcoming) ISBN 978-1-85604-584-1 Managing Records in Global Financial Markets: ensuring compliance and mitigating risk, by Lynn Coleman, Victoria L. Lemieux, Rod Stone and Geoffrey Yeo (eds) ISBN 978-1-85604-663-3 Preserving Archives, 2nd edition by Helen Forde and Jonathan Rhys-Lewis ISBN: 978-1-85604-823-1

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

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PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE IN RECORDS MANAGEMENT AND ARCHIVES Series Editor: Geoffrey Yeo

THE SILENCE OF THE ARCHIVE David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson

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© David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson 2017 Published by Facet Publishing 7 Ridgmount Street, London WC1E 7AE www.facetpublishing.co.uk Facet Publishing is wholly owned by CILIP: the Library and Information Association. The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as authors of this work. 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 978-1-78330-155-3 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78330-156-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78330-157-7 (e-book) First published 2017 Text printed on FSC accredited material.

Typeset from author’s files in 11.5/14 pt Garamond and Myriad Pro by Flagholme Publishing Services. Printed and made in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.

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Contents

Introduction to the Series Geoffrey Yeo

ix

About the authors

xiii

Foreword

xv

Anne J. Gilliland

Introduction 1

2

David Thomas

Enforced silences Simon Fowler

xix 1

Introduction

1

The power of the written

3

Silence in informality

6

Conflict and oppression as a cause of silence

9

Selection as a cause of the silence

14

The wrong kind of silence

17

The silence of the secret

22

The silence of destruction

29

Conclusion

34

Inappropriate expectations Simon Fowler

41

Introduction

41

‘Writing lived lives’: the skewing of the archive record

42

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3

4

5

When silence means silence: what records cannot tell us

45

Silence in other ways: cultural differences

48

The catalogue – hiding silences in plain view

53

Conclusion

60

The digital David Thomas

65

Introduction

65

Digital preservation

66

New dangers

68

E-mails

81

Digitized records

82

More information equals less knowledge

84

Authenticity

87

Capturing the archive

89

An existential threat to archives?

90

The future

93

Conclusion

95

Dealing with the silence Valerie Johnson

101

Introduction

101

False silences

101

False voices

102

Forcing open the doors: letting hidden voices speak

103

Filling the silence: allowing silent voices to speak

103

Acknowledging the silence as silence

105

Filling the silence: finding alternative voices

106

Reading voices back into history

107

Looking forward: listening to all the voices

107

Avoiding ‘white noise’: the need for some silence

108

Creating and welcoming the silence

110

Conclusion

113

Imagining archives

David Thomas

117

Introduction

117

Imagining archives

117

The slave trade

119

Imagined re-creations

120

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CONTENTS VII

Forging archives

6

7 Index

121

Imagining Shakespeare

122

Further into the hall of mirrors

132

Complete fictions

134

What does forgery tell us about archives?

135

Conclusion

136

Solutions to the silence Valerie Johnson

141

Introduction

141

Is legislation the answer?

141

Challenging silence in the archives: the archivists

142

Users as creators: taking back the power

149

Accepting inevitable silence

153

Changing voices in a new digital world

154

Conclusion

158

Are things getting better or worse?

David Thomas

163 181

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Introduction to the Series

Records and archives are important resources for individuals, organizations and the wider community. Records are created in the course of the functions and activities of organizations and the personal lives of individuals, and are preserved and maintained to support business and accountability and for cultural use. They provide evidence of, and information about, the actions of their creators and the environment in which those actions occurred. They extend and corroborate human and corporate memory and play a critical role in maintaining awareness of how the present is shaped by the past. Records are kept by almost everyone, but their management (and especially their medium-term and long-term management) is a professional discipline with its own distinctive body of knowledge. Within the discipline, ‘records’ and ‘archives’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but in English-speaking countries ‘archives’ usually denotes records which have been recognized as having long-term value. The term ‘archives’ can also be used more widely, to refer to collections of materials maintained by organizations, individuals, families or community groups, or to the locations where such materials are held. The series Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives aims both to disseminate and to add to the body of professional knowledge and understanding. Each text in the series is intended to offer a detailed overview of one or more key topics. The archives and records management discipline is experiencing rapid changes – not least as a result of the digital

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revolution – and the series aims to reflect the new technological context as well as the societal changes and governmental initiatives in many countries that are placing new emphases on compliance, accountability, access to information, community relations and participative culture. Some volumes in the series address theoretical and strategic issues relating to the creation, management and interpretation of records and archives or their role in society; others give practical guidance for those seeking successful and effective ways of managing them and presenting them to users. The authors come from many countries worldwide and are recognized experts in the field.

The Silence of the Archive Despite their acknowledged value as a resource for societies and individuals, archives do not always provide the evidence we seek, tell us what we want to know or contain what we expect to find in them. Their apparent incompleteness can often be puzzling, and sometimes frustrating, to those who seek to use them. However, absences in the archives are not a new occurrence. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham, who lived in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, related that, during the English ‘peasants’ revolt’ of 1381, some of the rebels went to the abbey of St Albans and demanded that the abbot should hand over an ancient charter with gold and blue lettering, in which (they said) their liberties were recorded. The abbot replied that he had no knowledge of such a charter. He agreed to make a search of the abbey’s archives, but when it was reported to the rebels that the search had failed to locate the charter they wanted, they refused to believe that it could not be found (Mauntel, 2015, 98). The archives remained silent, and the liberties claimed by the rebels stayed a matter of conjecture and contestation. At this distance of time, we cannot say with certainty whether a charter of ancient liberties (with or without gold and blue lettering) had existed at St Albans, or whether its existence was merely a fable. But although the circumstances of the peasants’ revolt and the demands of the insurgents now appear remote, many aspects of this story are still familiar; the insistence that the archives contain precisely what is requested, the seemingly implausible description of the document that is sought, the inability of the archives to supply what the requesters are looking for, and the belief of some enquirers that the records they want are being concealed in an act of subterfuge are all phenomena that archivists today will recognize.

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INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

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‘Silences’, as Canadian archivist Rodney Carter (2006, 217) observed, ‘haunt every archives’. In this book, David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson explore the societal impact of records and archives and the consequences of the silences that result when records are absent or uninformative. The Silence of the Archive looks at some of the ways in which those who occupy positions of authority may distort record-making or record-keeping activity, avoid creating records or destroy records prematurely for reasons of selfinterest. Because records can be used to hold individuals and organizations to account for the actions they undertake, individuals and organizations do not always relish the prospect of comprehensive record keeping. As Walsingham’s story illustrates, there is a long-standing belief in the power and importance of archives and records and their potential to determine the ordering of society. Yet it seems that archives are often silent when we expect them to speak. Why and how does this silence arise? Can we – should we – take steps to eliminate silences and to make good the apparent errors and omissions of past record keeping? Should we be working towards archives that ostensibly have no silences, that represent all human voices and embrace every aspect of our world? Or should we accept that archival silence is sometimes inevitable, that ‘silences may be built into the process of archival production’ (Manoff, 2016, 75) and that we cannot hope or aspire to record everything? Might there be situations where silence is to be welcomed and where it is appropriate for aspects of individual or communal history to be consigned to oblivion? All these questions, and many more besides, are addressed in this thought-provoking book. Geoffrey Yeo, Series Editor

References Carter, R. G. S. (2006) Of Things Said and Unsaid: power, archival silences, and power in silence, Archivaria, 61, 215–33. Manoff, M. (2016) Mapping Archival Silence: technology and the historical record. In Foscarini, F., MacNeil, H., Mak, B. and Oliver, G. (eds), Engaging with Records and Archives: histories and theories, Facet Publishing, 63–82. Mauntel, C. (2015) Charters, Pitchforks, and Green Seals: written documents between text and materiality in late medieval revolts. In Enderwitz, S. and Sauer, R. (eds), Communication and Materiality: written and unwritten communication in pre-modern societies, De Gruyter, 93–112.

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About the authors

Simon Fowler Simon Fowler is Associate Teaching Fellow in the Centre of Archives and Information Sciences at the University of Dundee. He worked at the Public Record Office on and off between 1979 and 2011 when he left to become a freelance researcher, writer and tutor specializing in the records of the 19th and 20th centuries. He has also been archivist at the Society of Genealogists and at Royal Star and Garter Homes and edited two family history magazines, Family History Monthly and Ancestors. Simon has written many books and articles mainly on family, military and local history. As well as teaching the Military Archives module at Dundee he teaches online courses for Pharos Tutors. As a historian and researcher he has long been aware of the silence of the archives. He says: ‘Missing collections skew our understanding of the past as it really was. More so than perhaps we realize. In particular, the unnecessary retention of material by governments is a real danger to society.’

Valerie Johnson Valerie Johnson is Director of Research and Collections at The National Archives, where she is responsible for supporting and co-ordinating innovative research, conservation and academic programmes. She is also responsible for The National Archives’ active support for archives. Prior to

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working at The National Archives, Valerie worked on a funded project based at the University of Cambridge History Faculty, and holds an MA with Distinction in Archive Administration. She was awarded the Alexander R. Myers Memorial Prize for Archive Administration, and won the Coleman Prize for her PhD thesis British Multinationals, Culture and Empire in the Early Twentieth Century. She is a Registered Member of the Society of Archivists, a Trustee and member of the Executive Committee of the Business Archives Council, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She has worked as an archivist and historian in the academic, corporate and public sectors.

David Thomas David Thomas is a Visiting Professor in the iSchool at the University of Northumbria where he is involved in research into the economic and juridical aspects of archives in the digital world. Previously, he worked at The National Archives where he was Director of Technology and was responsible for digital preservation, cybersecurity and providing access to digital material. David has published on archives, focusing on the implications of the digital. In addition, he has a research interest in forgery and falsification in archives and elsewhere and recently produced a book on this topic, Beggars, Cheats and Forgers (Pen and Sword, 2014). He is concerned about silences in archives caused by failures to deal with the digital and by over-zealous concerns with privacy and security.

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Foreword

In 2016, the wreck of a German submarine that sank on 30 April 1918 was discovered during a survey off the coast of Stranraer in Scotland. The discovery quickly caught the imagination of social media users because of the story that the submarine’s captain had told, at the time of his capture, of the submarine being attacked by a ferocious sea monster. Historian and archaeologist Innes McCartney argues that mariners’ stories of sea monster attacks are not that uncommon, perhaps due to the fact that crews were often on missions where, for intelligence or national security reasons, they were not permitted to discuss what actually took place, and that for the same reasons the official records of the events were sealed.1 While this is an eye-catching, if perhaps not the most immediately significant anecdote, it does illustrate an important point. The absence of records from public view, the absence of certain details in records that are available, or the absence of records altogether, are what drive not only frustrations and disappointments with the archive but also archival fantasies. In recent years Big Data initiatives, not to mention Hollywood, the video game industry and countless other popular media, have reinforced and even glamorized the public image of the archive as the ultimate repository of facts and the hope of future generations for uncovering ‘what actually happened’. The reality is, however, that for all sorts of reasons the record may not have been preserved or survived in the archive. In fact, the record may never even have existed – its creation being as imagined as is its contents. And even if it does exist, it may be silent on the salient facts, or it may obfuscate, mislead or flat out lie.

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As a result, archives and their contents are subject to many of the same longings, hopes and fears that we see rippling through wider society today, their silences providing fertile ground for imaginings, part-truths and the promulgation of ‘alternative facts’. But at the same time, as David Thomas rightfully reminds us in this book, certain voids in archives may also function as positive or humanly necessary spaces – tacit agreements and ellipses designed to leave unsaid or let slip away things that may be too painful, too problematic, too love-laden or too explicit to capture. Silences can thwart certainty and knowledge-based action, but today more than ever absences and voids in the archive may not be absolute or forever. Over time an apparently silent archive may give up new facts and tell new stories we did not expect or suspect, especially with the aid of new digital compilation and extraction technologies. The information age promised us that all information that exists would be accessible and knowable. The Big Data age promises that more will be knowable than we previously knew existed and that more voices will emerge, increasing anticipation but also raising tricky questions for archives about potentially exposing those who are most vulnerable, as well as ‘inconvenient’ knowledge. Indeed, when we regard archives as repositories of Big Data, when we can pinpoint the locations and degrees of silences, and when we can begin to interpolate and fill in the gaps through new forms of analysis and the knitting together of disparate traces, the repositories that so often served as bulwarks of the powerful may become dangerous liabilities for those entities, with as yet unknown consequences for the archive. Discerning and reading silences is also a matter of literacy. The general public have sometimes lost their ability to understand contemporary conventions of silence, such as the white space in an early literary manuscript, anomalies in colonial reports, or the absence of an expected face from an official photograph of Soviet leaders. In fact, a multiplicity of literacies is required to approach the world’s diverse archival legacy and its silences. Historical silences and their meanings, and ways to excavate them, have been brought to wider attention in recent decades by such prominent scholars as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Ann Laura Stoler; and, as Trouillot reminded us, these silences are often laden with power. To a large extent the archival field has preferred to focus on more pragmatic, normalizing expositions of the dimensions and particularities of their archives, leaving excavations and ruminations about power, absence and

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loss in the archive to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. The best archivists, however, can ‘get inside the head’ of their own archives, feeling their ‘pulses’, empathetically noting their silences, and contemplating the reasons for these and how to draw attention to them. Although we are increasingly looking to a future of automated archival processing of records, every archivist knows the depth of knowledge that is to be gained by laying out an entire series or collection and manually processing it. This is often knowledge that does not find its way into an archival finding aid: an intuition that comes from touching and poring over records that someone else created, organized and saved – a subliminal transfer of that other person’s labour and intent, and their dilemmas about the subject matter and individual lives being consigned to the record and saved for the archive. This book is written by three such archivists, displaying the breadth and depth of their knowledge and expertise to draw attention to the many limitations of archives and the inevitability of their having parameters. In light of not only the so-called ‘archival turn’ in humanities and social sciences scholarship but also of the political pressures upon archives and the digital opportunities presented to them, the authors’ expansive and expert views and reviews from inside the archive are more than timely. Anne J. Gilliland PhD Professor, Department of Information Studies, Director, Center for Information as Evidence, University of California Los Angeles

Note 1 Kennedy, M., U-boat Wreck Could be Sea Monster Victim of Internet Folklore, The Observer, 18 October 2016.

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Introduction David Thomas

It all started with a visit to Leningrad in Soviet days.1 When the economist E. F. Schumacher (1978; in Harley, 1988) was there, he lost his way and consulted a map, but this did not help because Schumacher could see several large churches from where he was standing, but there was no trace of them on his map. Eventually, an interpreter explained to him that churches were not shown on maps. Schumacher went on to say that it then occurred to him that all through school and university he had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things he most cared about and that seemed to him to be of the greatest importance to the conduct of his life. For many years he had been perplexed and no interpreter had come along to help him. Following this incident, he said that he ceased to suspect the sanity of his perceptions and began to suspect the soundness of the maps. Following on from this, the map historian J. B. Harley (1988) undertook a critical examination of early modern maps. He based his interpretation on the theoretical philosophical viewpoint that things which were absent from maps were as much a proper field for enquiry as things which were present and that silences should be regarded as positive statements and not merely as passive gaps. He also took some insights from sociology, particularly from Michel Foucault. He drew on the idea of powerknowledge: that there is a close link between power and knowledge; that power creates knowledge and that maps could be seen as tools of state measurement, enquiry, examination and coercion. He argued that the need

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for state secrecy and commercial confidentiality, as well as purely technical, cartographic factors, led to silences on maps. In addition, he used Foucault’s idea of the episteme – that each society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth, which impacted on cartography. As a result, early modern maps which were influenced by Euclidian ideas about space being uniform and continuous, depicted towns as being much the same as each other, the villages were more or less identical and were arranged in a neat taxonomic hierarchy. Harley’s revolutionary view of cartography was published in 1988. In more recent times, a very similar analysis has begun to be applied to archives. Drawing on the works of Foucault and Jacques Derrida, archival theorists have begun to see archives as places of power; it has become more accepted that archival silences are a proper subject for enquiry and to view the absence of records as positive statements, rather than passive gaps. This book is an attempt to peer into the archival silences – to determine whether they are the result of technology or of power, or whether they exist because of society’s view of truth. We will be asking Schumacher’s implied question – should we begin to suspect the soundness of the archive? It is worth starting by stating what we mean by archive. As Derrida (1995, 57) pointed out, ‘nothing is less clear today than the word “archive” ’. For our purposes, we have taken a traditional view of archives in the analogue world, seeing them as collections of records, including official publications, but not other printed sources. Once we come to the digital, then we have looked beyond the purely archival, drawing examples from the world of digitized books, online collections of data or documents, as well as borndigital or digitized records. In the pre-digital world, we have seen archives as largely being held by archival institutions, although, of course some records, such as those of some great landed estates and corporate bodies, are still held by their creators. What is essential is that such records are managed. As we will see, these two tests – that archives are held by their creators or an archival institution and that they are managed – has ceased to apply in the digital world. Having said that archives consist of records, we have to decide what constitutes records. Traditionally, archivists in the analogue world followed the doctrine of the theorist Hilary Jenkinson, who defined a document belonging to an archive as one:

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which was drawn up or used in the course of an administrative or executive transaction (whether public or private) of which itself formed a part; and subsequently preserved in their own custody for their own information by the person or persons responsible for that transaction and their legitimate successors. (Jenkinson, 1922, 11)

For Jenkinson, who wrote in the 1920s, archives were textual and linguistic. This remains the dominant theoretical paradigm. The same concepts are apparent in the International Organization for Standards’ definition of records: ‘information created, received and maintained as evidence and information by an organisation or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business’. Geoffrey Yeo (2007, 342) produced a similar but slightly nuanced version of this definition when he defined records as ‘persistent representations of activities, created by participants or observers of those activities or by their authorized proxies’. He said this included records created by mechanical devices as well as humans and records created by proxies such as secretaries and legal advisors on behalf of their principals. He later (2008) extended this definition to deal with the fact that elementary records often represent steps within activities and that aggregations of elementary records can constitute records at higher levels. But the link between records and activities remains clear. The digital has posed some challenges to this view of archives. Some records, such as websites, large databases and even corporate registers of shareholders, are in a constant state of change and this has posed severe difficulties. It is simply not possible to capture every state of a website which might change very rapidly over short periods of time. Similarly, it is hard to capture a continuous record of a large database. Other archivists, aware of the slipperiness of digital records, have focused instead on the post-custodial paradigm in which analysis of the characteristics of individual records is replaced by understanding the business functions, transactions and workflows that cause documents to be created. Digital records are not seen as having a solely physical existence, but as virtual concepts, performances or processes (Cunningham, 2011). Our interest in the issue of silences or gaps in archives was sparked partly by the growing literature in this field, both historical and archival and, in particular, the work of historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose writings on the subject covered a range of human activities

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from the Haitian Revolution to American sports. But our own experience of archival research has also led us up against a sufficient number of brick walls to realize that archives are not always the repositories of truth we had once believed. People we knew to have been in the UK in 1901 could not be found in the census; many records of World War I had disappeared. What was going on? One of us (David Thomas) has had a long interest in forgers and has looked at historical forgeries from the Donation of Constantine to the Shakespeare forgeries of John Payne Collier, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the works of the Mormon forger Mark Hofmann and the forgeries of documents relating to the death of Heinrich Himmler. There seemed to be something unusual about the Shakespeare forgeries; the others could be easily explained – they were either about money (Constantine, Hofmann), politics and anti-Semitism (the Protocols) or possibly a mixture of money and politics (the Himmler forgeries). Shakespearean forgeries seem to have been different; from the 17th century onwards people were inventing stories and later forging documents to fill in the huge archival black hole which is the personal life of William Shakespeare. A growing awareness of the problems of the move to the digital was also part of the motivation behind this book. While a few writers, such as Michael Moss, have been discussing this issue for much of the century, most people writing from an archival or library point of view have focused on the issues of digital preservation. We believe that historians have tended to look at the technical and scholarly possibilities for new forms of research which the digital affords, but seem to be rather less concerned about issues of future access to electronic archives. It is difficult to prove this rather negative point of view, but in 2015 Sir Alex Allan, the former senior civil servant, published a significant report on how the UK government managed its electronic records and archives. Despite the importance of the report and the concerns which Allan expressed, his work does not seem to have caused a major stir among professional historians. All of us have had a long experience of working in the UK public sector, although we have all worked outside it, but, inevitably, our analysis is influenced by that experience and many of the examples we cite come from there. The book looks at a range of reasons why there are silences in the archive. In Chapter 1, Simon Fowler describes how there may be significant failings at all stages of the process of selecting, acquiring and preserving records,

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which may lead to archival silences. The powerful may prevent records from being created, preserved or accessed or officials may be unwilling or unable to create archives. He discusses how records are at particular risk during periods of war or oppression and describes cases where archivists have failed to select appropriate material and how and where records may be deliberately destroyed. He also describes how the introduction of Freedom of Information legislation in the UK has had an impact, albeit limited, on access to archives. In Chapter 2, Simon Fowler explains that users may sometimes have unreasonable expectations about what records have been created and what survive, thus creating an impression that the situation is worse than it is in reality. This is compounded by a significant variance in social organization and hence record-keeping traditions between England and Wales and other European countries. Here we have a secular tradition of providing social care going back to the early 17th century and we use the common law. In many other countries, care of the sick or impoverished was the responsibility of the religious for much longer than in England and Wales. Equally, the use of civil law has resulted in a huge difference in the way records are created and kept in continental Europe. Finally, British concerns for privacy have resulted in a less comprehensive record relating to individuals than in some European countries. In Chapter 3, David Thomas describes how the move to the use of the digital in creating records has led to potential difficulties for future users of archives. Traditionally, archivists have been concerned about the potential loss of information because of technological obsolescence and the dangers to which records are exposed in the period between when they are created and when they are moved to the archive. More recently, there has been a huge growth in the scale of digital records which makes normal archival processing, especially selection and review for sensitivity, difficult. The large volume of material encourages some institutions to automatically destroy sensitive material in order to avoid the costs and difficulties of responding to Freedom of Information queries on digital data. In some cases, government ministers and officials may not record their actions, or may use alternative methods of communication which are outside the scope of the archive. The procedures for managing records have not kept pace with changes in technology and there are specific problems with some of the newer types of record – e-mails, the internet and digitized material. There are also

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difficulties with identifying relevant items among such records using conventional search tools and new and more powerful technologies are needed to make sense of digital archives. Increasingly, information is being stored outside conventional systems, whether in social media sites or in the cloud, and this, in turn, makes it harder to archive and much data may have already vanished. Steps are being taken to develop standards and approaches to ensure the long-term future of digital information and it has proved possible to capture some records under extreme circumstances, but in the longer term a new and more radical approach to the digital is essential if it is not to pose an existential threat to archives. In Chapter 4, Valerie Johnson goes on to consider what the possibilities are for dealing with these silences: the implications of the current outbreak of leaks of confidential information, reconstructing lost or damaged records, the possibilities of ‘absent heritage’, working around the silences, reading against the silences and including a broader range of voices in the archive. In addition, she looks at the need to acknowledge and value silences. In Chapter 5, David Thomas describes how users have dealt with silences – because the documentary evidence they wished to see cannot be found, they have used a number of approaches, including imagining what was missing or, in the absence of evidence, producing fictionalized accounts of events. While these are legitimate responses, some researchers have gone much further and based claims on the idea that something must have happened. Because there is a 17th-century pub in Southwark, The George, on the site of an earlier building which was probably known to Shakespeare, he must have visited it, mustn’t he? From there it is a simple step to forge manuscripts. Little is known of Shakespeare’s personal life and acting career, so why not fill in the blanks with a few spurious records? In Chapter 6, Valerie Johnson considers possible solutions – the role of various actors in the documentary and archival process, the joint responsibility for change, and possible paths ahead. Finally, in Chapter 7, David Thomas explores two questions: first, are the silences in archives likely to get better or worse? Second, what impact do these silences have on user-perceptions of archives? How do historians, our main academic customers, see archives? In a world where the current discourse is increasingly concerned with a post-truth society, it is easy to imagine that archives are shining beacons of

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truth. However, as this book demonstrates clearly, they have their silences, as well as their falsities and forgeries. While individual articles have been written on this topic, they have often been written from a narrow perspective, discussing particular aspects of the silence. This is the first time that the question of silence in the archives has been discussed holistically and from a broad perspective, looking at causes, responses and implications both for researchers and for the archive itself. As such, it will appeal to archivists, records managers, researchers and records creators, because it will help provide a framework and context to their activities and enable them to better evaluate archives in a post-truth society. It also deals with specific issues of current concern, notably silences in the digital world. It looks at user satisfaction and audience development, considering situations in which users have been unable to find the material they are seeking. It describes how these situations arise and ways of dealing with them. We would like to thank Geoffrey Yeo and Michael Moss for their advice on the contents of this book, although all errors remain our own.

Note 1 Thanks to Sarah Tyacke for telling us this story.

References Allan, A. (2015) Review of Government Digital Records, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 486418/Report_-_Digital_Records_Review.pdf. Cunningham, A. (2011) The Postcustodial Archive. In Hill, J. (ed.), The Future of Archives and Record Keeping: a reader, Facet Publishing, 173–89. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: a Freudian impression, Diacritics, 25 (2), 9–63. Harley, J. B. (1988), Silences and Secrecy: the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe, Imago Mundi, 40, 56–76. Jenkinson, H. (1922) A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making, Clarendon Press. Schumacher, E. F. (1978) On Philosophical Maps. In A Guide for the Perplexed, Sphere, 9–23. Yeo, G. (2007) Concepts of Record (1): evidence, information, and persistent

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representations, The American Archivist, 70 (2), 315–43. Yeo, G. (2008) Concepts of Record (2): prototypes and boundary objects, The American Archivist, 71 (1) 118–43.

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CHAPTER 1 Enforced silences Simon Fowler

Introduction Archival institutions are not neutral places. Nor are their archives neutral. Nor indeed is the subject of this book: what the archives do not have. This may sound platitudinous: something a history student might write in an essay. This chapter, and the next, explore why this has long been the case in the context of traditional, one might say analogue, archives. In this chapter we will consider how archival institutions have traditionally failed to meet the needs of host communities and why there have been great gaps in the collections, and in archival collecting policies. In the words of the great French historian Marc Bloch, the records of a society are ‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ (Bloch, 1953, 51). That is, on the one hand the records become witnesses in the evidentiary sense arising from the process of record making and record keeping and, on the other, also bear witness to the lives of those who are the subjects of the records. The historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015, 48, 52) suggests that archival institutions organize facts and sources and condition the possibility of existence of historical statements. Their work of collection ‘is an active act of production that prepares facts for historical intelligibility. They are the institutionalised sites of mediation between the socio-historical process and the narrative about that process.’ Sources and archives are neither neutral nor natural. They are created. It is this that is the reason for so many silences. Archival creation is, of course,

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a human process, starting from individuals who produce the records, continuing through the selection process used by archivists and ending up with cataloguing and delivery of documents. Indeed, archival institutions may literally impose silence on records. Users sit in reverential silence, often beneath notices asking them to be quiet, silently reading from documents. But some at least of the documents they read were meant to be read aloud or, in the case of history testimony, meant to be listened to. From the mid-16th century onwards, witness statements in English and Welsh legal cases were increasingly recorded in writing under oath before the trial. The documents produced in this way and which still survive came to replace the witnesses’ live appearance in court during the trial. However, they were not produced in court as material objects; instead, they were returned to their oral point of origin by being read out by the court clerk and it was this reading aloud which constituted evidence, not the document which underwrote the clerk’s performance. Till Geiger, Niamh Moore and Mike Savage echoed such sentiments from the perspective of contemporary sociology: A key concern is that archived data has lost its context, or that even if some contextual information is provided, that this will not quite be enough, that in any case the transcript of an interview, with no matter how much metadata attached, will never have all its context, that a transcript is not an interview, and of course, indeed, it never can be. It is something else, perhaps an artefact of the research process. (Geiger, Moore and Savage, 2010, 21)

When we read Isabella Newport’s statement to the London Commissary Court in 1492, we are reading the authentic voice of an angry woman half a millennium ago: ‘I met Newport and had the hooreson by the face . . . and pushed him into the dyche . . . the bald hooreson Cokkold wer hangyed than he should be my husband’ (Cox, 1993, 43), but while it is immediate and startling we have to read it silently in the reading room of an archival institution. In discussing the recording of oral history, the South African archivist, Verne Harris (Harris, 1997, 139) made the point that it is not just the text, but also the act of reciting oral histories, which gives them their meaning and this recitation is linked to social situation, space, landscape, physical landmarks and items of material culture. In the very act of transcription

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there is translation. What is written down may well not be exactly what was said. The pauses and the sighs may say as much, if not more, than the words themselves.

The power of the written The existence of written archives exercises a power over what is the subject of academic discourse and even what is known more generally. People who lack a tradition of creating written records may find their history written by others or ignored altogether. The mounds at Cahokia, north-east of St Louis, are the site of North America’s largest pre-Columbian city, dated between about 600 and 1350 CE, but its history has been forgotten because there are no written records or even oral memories; even its original name is not known. ‘The earth and the mounds provide the only narrative. Visitors can interpret what they find in whatever way they like’ (Bey, 2016). Where oral traditions survive they can sometimes fill in for the lack of a written record. In West Africa, for example, Griot praise singers can recite the pedigrees of the rich families who employ them back 20 generations or more. In a world where writing was practically unknown the Griot guaranteed not only the survival of their people as a culturally and historically defined group, but also the social status of the nobles to whom they were attached (Hopkins, 1997, 46; Panzacchi, 1994, 182). Even today, where the written word is ubiquitous, oral testimony can still play an important role, for example in countries where there are few archives (Bastian, 2003). More specifically, in uncovering the campaign against activists in South Africa during the apartheid regime Verne Harris concludes that: ‘as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) unfolded the details of that campaign, it was oral rather than documentary evidence which carried the story. The archival record is but a sliver of social memory’ (Harris, 2002, 64). Groups, indeed whole societies, that operate outside a written culture do not produce archives in the conventional sense. Trouillot (2015, 90–2) discussed at length the European intellectual reaction to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 that led to the creation of the first black-led state in the Americas. He describes how, although there are many records in France about the revolt, there were few texts setting out the views of the revolutionaries. This was partly because the idea of a slave revolt and a

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black republic was totally new and outside European expectations, but also because most slaves were illiterate and the printed word was not a realistic means of propaganda in the context of a slave colony. Back in colonial France, the reaction was one of initial disbelief, followed by a strong conviction that the slaves would lose. In the opinion of most people in France at that time, since slaves could not conceive of a revolution themselves, then it had to be the result of outside agitators. Trouillot says ‘Conservative colonialists and anti-slavery republicans accused each other of being the brains behind the revolt. Inferences were drawn from writings that could not have possibly reached or moved the slaves . . . even if they knew how to read’. The absence of a written record of the thoughts of the revolutionaries may have contributed to the failure of historians to engage with the revolution until recently. According to Trouillot, historians have either erased or trivialized the revolution. The great British historian, Eric Hobsbawm scarcely mentions Haiti in his book The Age of Revolutions, 1789– 1843, while other writers have seen the outcome of the revolution as a medical issue: the French were defeated by disease, not by the Haitians. Trouillot (2015, 99) says ‘What we are observing here is archival power at its strongest, the power to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and therefore of mention’. Anthropologist Ann Stoler (2002) has written of colonial archives both as documents of exclusion and as monuments to particular configurations of power in themselves. She adds that ‘If it is obvious that colonial archives are products of state machines, it is less obvious that they are, in their own right, technologies that bolstered the production of those states themselves.’ More recently Jordanna Bailkin, a student of modern Britain and empire, argued that: Many scholars have argued that colonialism was archive-dependent from its earliest manifestations. The first European colonial explorers perceived detailed recordkeeping as a vital matter of life and death: a mechanism to recalibrate the demographic balance of power between rulers and ruled. We might say the same, of course, about most systems of governance. Yet some have proposed that colonial states are more closely allied with archives than are other state forms, because colonialism relies on the upholding of classificatory systems (for example, of racial difference) that require elaborate archival apparatuses. (Bailkin, 2015, 886)

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This is why perhaps the most important British archival scandal of recent years was the revelation in 2011 that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) had apparently concealed some 20,000 intelligence, security and other files which British colonial officials had sent back to London as colonies were granted independence in the 1950s and 1960s, as part of a move that was ironically codenamed Operation Legacy. The papers came to light as lawyers acting for former participants in the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya sought redress for their treatment and internment by the British colonial authorities. When former British colonies won their independence, the normal procedure for dealing with records was that those which had been created locally remained in the country, while correspondence, reports and other papers which had been sent from the colonial governments to the Colonial Office in London were eventually transferred to the UK Public Record Office (now The National Archives). Guidelines issued to colonial governments in 1961 made the further recommendation that documents which might embarrass the British or other governments or certain individuals who had undertaken work of a sensitive nature, or which might compromise sources of intelligence or be used unethically by a successor government, should be sent to London (Banton, 2012, 325). The files in what became known as the Migrated Archives had been held by the FCO since the 1960s in bureaucratic limbo. For several decades they had all but been forgotten. The FCO did not want to keep the files, but did not wish to return them to the countries where they had come from. In turn The National Archives (TNA) did not want to take the files and advised that, in accordance with normal practice, they should be returned to the former colonies that had created them. In 2010 the FCO commissioned Anthony Cary, a former diplomat, to examine what went wrong and what lessons should be drawn. His report emphasized bureaucratic incompetence and loss of corporate memory rather than any deliberate intention to conceal the existence of the files (Cary, 2011). Eventually they were transferred in batches to TNA where they now form series FCO 141. The revelation of the existence of this archive changed the view of the end of the British Empire from one that had been generally thought to be benign to one that revealed the true extent of British attempts to supress independence movements, particularly in Kenya and Cyprus. The American academic Caroline Elkins says ‘The overarching takeaway is that the

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[British] government itself was involved in a very highly choreographed, systematised process of destroying and removing documents so it could craft the official narrative that sits in these archives’ (Parry, 2016; Cobain, 2016, 106, 131). In addition, as British archivist Mandy Banton (2012, 322) suggests, the removal of this material has affected not only the ability of these countries, who were largely unaware that this material had existed, to reconstruct their national histories, but also their capacity to support good governance and accountability and protect the rights of their citizens. Historians are now beginning to go through the material to discover what stories have been forgotten. Archivists too need to learn the lessons.

Silence in informality The most obvious reason for silences in an archive is that records have simply not been created. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including deliberate policy that certain decisions would not be recorded, how information was once regarded, or simply the pressure of events. Eighteenthand 19th-century personnel records of the British armed services, for example, very rarely mention the wives and families of serving soldiers and seamen because as their dependents did not receive a pension there was no requirement to record their details (Fowler, 2011, 106–7). Non-creation of records may be the result of inertia or have more sinister motives. One obvious threat to the completeness of records is that officials and elected government ministers may not document decision-making processes, or that they might prefer to use informal methods. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration (1997–2007) was often characterized as being a ‘sofa government’. There was a deliberate policy of turning away from the formal recording of discussions and decisions by government officials to a much more informal approach. The extent of this major cultural shift from a system that revolved around careful record keeping was exposed during the Hutton Inquiry in 2003 into the death of Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, revealed that no minutes were taken of meetings relevant to the Inquiry. He was then asked whether minutes were taken of any other government meetings and he replied that:

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the usual pattern is about three written records for seventeen meetings a day is the average you sort of get to because there is no purpose served by minutes unless they are either recording people visiting from outside, the president of Nigeria, for example, or something like that, or if they are action points that need to be taken forward. (Moss, 2012, 860–1)

Pressure of events can also restrict what is recorded. At the end of September 2008, Ireland faced a major challenge to its banking system at a time when the world was facing a near-collapse of global debt markets following the financial crisis that began in 2007. The Irish banks were heavily indebted and had lent huge amounts to the construction sector. It was obvious that they were in a very vulnerable position and at the end of that month the Irish government announced a state guarantee for their debts. Soon afterwards, Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, produced a report into the crisis. In the part of his report discussing the events of September 2008, he pointed out that: A detailed review of the ensuing discussions is hampered by the absence of an extensive written record of what transpired. Although the minutes of meetings of the CBFSAI [Central Bank and Financial Services Authority Ireland] Board and the [Irish Financial Services Regulatory] Authority during the period contain references to various options, there is an absence of documentation setting forth the advantages and disadvantages of possible alternatives and their quantitative implications. While CBFSAI Board members expressed some broad views on possible approaches; no decisions were taken, as the solutions would need to be found at Governmental level. The key discussions took place via the very many informal contacts and meetings between senior officials of the DSG [Domestic Standing Group] agencies, the NTMA [National Treasury Management Agency], and consultants; what follows relies to a very large extent on the personal recollections of participants. (Honohan, 2010, 8.18)

Although this lack of detailed record keeping may be understandable in a crisis, it seems it was endemic within the Central Bank and Financial Services organization. Honohan describes how: The minutes of both CBFSAI Board and Authority meetings typically record only the broad consensus on the issues discussed and any decisions taken. They

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do not describe in any detail the frequent debates and often significant differences of opinion that, according to Board and Authority members interviewed for this Report, existed on some issues, especially the possible risks to financial stability. (Honohan, 2010, 3.17)

Perhaps the most notorious example of a deliberate policy not to record decisions relates to the Suez Crisis in 1956, when the government of Egypt made the decision to nationalize the largely British-owned Suez Canal (Black, 2006). Lord Bancroft, who was private secretary to a senior minister of the British government at the time of the crisis, later told a television station that: The difficulty about the whole of the Suez episode was that it wasn’t dealt with as part of the normal system of Cabinet government. There was a little committee . . . everything seemed to be conducted in a hurried, reactive, almost furtive way . . . It seemed to me to typify the dangers of trying to run something as if it were a private laundry and not, as we then were, a major country on the world stage engaged in a singularly difficult adventure. (Hennessy, 1986, 8)

Several key records were destroyed at the time, on the orders of the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden. They related to secret meetings held between representatives of Britain, France and Israel from 22 to 24 October 1956. Against all the rules, Eden insisted that no written account of the meetings be prepared. The outcome of the meetings was the Sèvres Protocol in which Israel undertook to attack Egypt, prompting Britain and France to invade on the pretext of ‘separating the combatants’ and thus protecting the canal. The fate of the British copy of the Protocol has long been a source of considerable speculation (The National Archives, 2006). According to one of the British officials, Sir Patrick Dean, on returning from Sèvres on 24 October he went immediately to 10 Downing Street. There he met Eden and a small group of senior ministers and handed the Protocol over to Eden. Eden was clearly upset that the agreement had been put down in writing, and it is likely that it was tossed onto a fire by Eden or one of his advisors. Fortunately, a copy survives in an Israeli archive. Private archives are sometimes skewed to put their creator in a good light. This is perhaps most often the case with those politicians who are

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aware of history and how historians might use their papers to interpret their achievements. The US President Franklin D. Roosevelt rarely put his thoughts down on paper and gave only a partial glimpse of what he was thinking or planning even to those people he trusted. At the opening of his presidential library at Hyde Park, NY, in June 1941, he was asked why he seemed particularly cheerful. ‘I am thinking,’ he replied, ‘of all the historians who will come here thinking they’ll find the answers to their questions’ (MacMillan, 2015, 38–9). Debate about British relations with Nazi Germany during the spring and summer of 1940 is similarly hampered because the private papers of many of the key participants are missing. According to the American historian John Lukacs, who has written extensively on the subject: [The British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain did not weed his papers and correspondence . . . or at least not much. [Foreign Secretary Lord] Halifax . . . did so more considerably, as did Lady Halifax . . . the diaries of [the minister] Sir Maurice Hankey have been culled: there is either nothing or very little for each year of the period 1939–1944, though some of his correspondence is there. In the papers of David Margesson, the [Conservative] Chief Whip . . . the years 1939–45 are missing. (Lukacs, 2001, 57–8)

Conflict and oppression as a cause of silence The partial and political nature of archives is nowhere clearer than when we look at war and political conflict. In some cases, records relating to warfare may be kept closed for very long periods. Sometimes, records of oppressive acts are never created, while in others, records of oppression are destroyed in order to protect the oppressors. In France, files relating to the collaborationist regime in Vichy between 1940 and 1944 remained inaccessible until they were finally opened at the beginning of 2016 (France 24, 2015). The papers include more than 200,000 documents relating to cases brought before special courts established under the regime. They reveal details about the work of brigades made up of French citizens which targeted and rounded up Resistance fighters, communists and Jews during the German occupation. The most sensitive of the files refers to the ‘shadowing’ of citizens – the tracking of individuals and Resistance groups – with records of interrogation and letters of denunciation in which French

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citizens were encouraged to spy and inform on one another. Jean-Pierre Azéma, a specialist on World War II, said that allowing public access to the archives was crucial to understanding France’s role during the Vichy period, but cautioned that any information extrapolated from the documents should be used responsibly: When we use these archival documents to understand the past, we need to exercise caution about the kind of conclusions we draw . . . There’s an obligation – that applies not just to historians – but to everyone who has the privilege of accessing these documents, to respect the honour of individuals (France 24, 2015)

Verne Harris (2002) has described in detail how the apartheid regime in South Africa destroyed public records in order to keep processes secret and how, during the transfer of power from 1990 to 1994, the state engaged in a large-scale sanitization of its memory resources in order to keep certain information out of the hands of a future democratic government. A similar pattern of behaviour had occurred in what was then Southern Rhodesia before the transfer of power to majority government in 1980. In South Africa, the destruction was widely suspected and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was set up to investigate abuses during the apartheid years conducted a major investigation into the loss of records. Not only had the operational records of the regime’s security apparatus been burned or shredded, but also the records they had confiscated over the years from individuals and organizations had suffered the same fate. Even so, significant accumulations of records that had somehow escaped the purge survive. At no time are records at greater risk than during a war and Britain’s archival heritage bears deep scars of the two world wars. During both world wars hundreds of tons of documents were sent away for reuse as scrap paper. One of the great gaps in the British archival record relates to World War I. The vast majority of files, including a number of significant archives, have been destroyed, some by fire, but most deliberately. And yet this was not meant to happen. In the 1920s, it was recognized that: The use that can be made of these records as sources for an authentic history of the World War will depend on the ideals and demands of coming generations:

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yet it is already clear that the chief interest of the present generation is not to prepare for war, but to assure the establishment of peace, the eventual study of wartime documents will be directed to some other end than military and naval strategy or diplomatic chicanery . . . The historian of the World War who would like to know the whole truth about its causes and results will therefore, have special need of reference to authentic documents, many of which lie outside the ordinary categories (Hall, 1925, xiv)

Initially it was proposed that the new Imperial War Museum, whose remit was to collect and preserve artefacts relating to World War 1, should also preserve the archival record. On good archival grounds the Public Record Office opposed the proposal and there was little public enthusiasm (Cantwell, 1991, 384). Instead a national War Records Disposal Committee was established to decide which records should be kept, both centrally and locally. It seems to have been particularly ineffective, to the extent that its own records have long since been destroyed. Reverting to the pre-war system most British government departments prepared schedules of material to be destroyed without consulting historians or other potential users. As a result, huge amounts of potentially valuable documents were lost including those of the Ministry of Information ‘which should have been a great intellectual force on the side of the Allies but has left few traces of its proceedings for the information of the historians present or to come’ and the National Register of men eligible for conscription which was destroyed in its entirety in 1919 (Hall, 1925, 76, 89). Locally the preservation of material depended largely on the goodwill of local authorities. Some boroughs took great pride in keeping records of the war (although as relatively little has survived to the present day one has to conclude that it was not always an enduring pride), but ‘public authorities in [many] localities could not be induced to take any steps for the care of their war records, and . . . private efforts for this purpose would not be forthcoming’ (Hall, 1925, 113). One exception was Bedfordshire, where the dynamic county archivist George Herbert Fowler acquired various collections of war-related material for the county record office (Bell and Stitt, 2002, 253). Why was this the position? In the early 1920s, Bedfordshire was the only English county that had a recognizable record office. In most other counties records would have found their way to the central library or been kept in attics and basements, where undoubtedly many would have been

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donated to the scrap paper drive during World War II. Probably more telling is the fact that within a couple of years of the Armistice in 1918 there was a clear desire to regard the World War as being a horrible mistake to be forgotten about. In describing the destruction of the records of the Ministry of National Service, Hall writes (1925, 81–2) that: ‘with the confusion and disillusionment that followed the application of reconstructive measures, a revolution of sentiment can be noticed which eventually led to a drastic revision of the records of the Ministry’. The future needs of historians were as nothing compared to national sentiment. By 1939 the lessons of World War I had largely been learnt. During World War II there was a better understanding of the need to protect the records and also of the future needs of historians. As Joan Wake, secretary of the Northamptonshire Record Society, wrote to The Times at the height of the Blitz in November 1940: ‘If English history does not matter, all this destruction does not matter in the least, and the sooner we boil down Domesday Book to make glue for aeroplanes, and use the famous ‘‘scrap of paper’’ to make wads for cartridges the better’ (Cantwell, 1991, 439). But there was a new threat, in the form of destruction from the air, to which paper was particularly vulnerable, and a number of archives suffered as the result of bombing. In 1941 the Public Record Office asked the Ministry of Home Security, which was responsible for civil defence, to circulate regional headquarters with a plea to look out for and take special care of archival material damaged as the result of air raids. Among many other acts of destruction, a major loss was the burning of a huge collection of War Office records at the Army Record Store during the Blitz in September 1940 (Seligmann, 2006, 52–3). In 1942 the records of the 1931 Census for England and Wales were destroyed in a huge fire in a store at Hayes in Middlesex. Although the cause of the fire is not known, it was not due to enemy action but may have been the result of a discarded cigarette (www.1911census.org.uk/1931.htm). There were also new resources available to archivists, particularly the British Records Association, which had been formed in 1932 in part to preserve collections of archives locally. The association did sterling work in ensuring that documents of value were not wantonly destroyed (Ketelaar, 2013, 29). According to Deputy Keeper of Public Records Cyril Flower (1943, 27), it gave ‘any help possible in the removal of those [records] which were exposed to the greatest danger and in the repair of those that had

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already suffered injury . . . [and] to arouse public interest in the dangers threatened by raids and to preserve from salvage documents which have historical value.’ The Public Record Office took the lead in paper salvage drives across British government departments, making it easier to destroy records of limited value while protecting those of perceived importance (Cantwell, 1991, 432). In addressing the Royal Historical Society in the autumn of 1943, Flower blandly reassured members that Inspecting Officers from the Public Record Office: ‘have never knowingly sacrificed records which might be of real use to the future historian. At the same time it is believed that the cellars of Whitehall and of many other repositories up and down the land have made and are making a rich contribution to the salvage movement’ (Flower, 1943, 26). However, in the 1950 Webb Lecture, Sir William Hancock, Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at London University, foresaw difficulties ahead in securing an adequate record of World War II: I doubt whether the old procedures of the Public Record Office can cope with it. Some of the most precious grain of war-historical record never got into the registered files and may never come to the . . . Office. Conversely in the registered files of the war period there are tares by the million, but good wheat is mingled with the tares. How can they be separated?’ (Rock, 2016, 64)

In fact, there are surprisingly few serious gaps in the surviving World War II records of the British government. This is doubly remarkable when one considers that the vast majority of files were hurriedly transferred to the Public Record Office between 1969 and 1972 after the rule regarding the period of closure of government files was reduced from 50 to 30 years. Much of course has been destroyed, but with the perhaps understandable exception of the Special Operations Executive, which ran agents and supported resistance movements in occupied countries, whose records were heavily weeded immediately after the end of the war, most of the key records vital to the study of the war survive and are in the public domain. The big exceptions, as we will see, are the records of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and to a large extent the Security Service (MI5).

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Selection as a cause of the silence Selection is at the heart of the current archival process and failures in selection can lead to archival silences. In the paper era, archival institutions traditionally only took a very small proportion of the number of records created by organizations. Verne Harris expressed this very clearly in a South African context: Even if we were to preserve every record generated throughout South Africa, and conceding the remarkably comprehensive and detailed documentation of process offered by the computer, we would still only have a sliver of a window into South African experience. But of course in practice this record universum is substantially reduced through deliberate and inadvertent destruction by records creators and managers leaving a sliver of a sliver from which archivists select what they will preserve. And they do not preserve much – for instance at present the National Archives [of South Africa] aims to preserve five per cent of all public records . . . So archives offer researchers at best a sliver of a sliver of a sliver. (Harris, 1997, 137)

If the archival institutions are South Africa’s central memory institutions, then we are in deep amnesic trouble. Harris’s description of archives as a sliver of a sliver of a sliver seems to be generally valid; at the National Archives of the United States, archivists typically appraise 2–5% of US government records as meeting their requirements for archival preservation (National Archives of the United States, 2016). Inevitably there has been much destruction of individual items or patchy survival of material within particular series of records. Dutch archivist Eric Ketelaar argues that: The decision to destroy a document is as much part of the archival consciousness as the decision to keep it. What is recorded and archived, what is left out, what is destroyed, what is determined by what I have called archivalisation, meaning the conscious or unconscious choice (determined by social and cultural factors) to consider something worth archiving – or not. (Ketelaar, 2013, 28)

He quotes the former Archivist of the United States, Frank Burke, who asked: ‘What is it within the nature of society that makes it create the records that it does? Is this impulse purely a practical one, or is there

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something in the human psyche that dictates the keeping of a record, and what is the motivation for this act?’ (Ketelaar, 2013, 29). Undoubtedly the key moment in the life of a document is its appraisal: the point at which a decision is made as to whether it is worthy of being kept. This is probably the most important task engaged in by the archivist or records manager. There may be schedules and plans available to help in the selection process, but ultimately it is the record keeper’s responsibility to decide what is kept. The expectations of the end-user are high. The historian expects the archivist to make the right decision: to keep material of genuine historical interest. And the organization expects to be able to find material that will be useful to it in the performance of its business. In selecting records the archivist has to second-guess history: what will be of value in 5, 50 or 500 years’ time? Canadian archivist Terry Cook reinforces the importance of these decisions: We need to remain extraordinarily sensitive to the political, social, philosophical, and ethical nature of archival appraisal, for that process defines the creators, the functions, and the activities to be reflected in archives, by defining and selecting in turn which related documents are to be preserved permanently, and thus are to enjoy all subsequently flowing archival activities (processing, description, preservation, reference, online posting, exhibition, and so on); and, with finality, appraisal also starkly determines which documents are destroyed, excluded from archives, their creators forgotten, effaced from memory – all this done by us, the archivists. (Cook, 2007, 174)

In truth, none of us can really know what is likely to be of importance in the future, but the archivist must make shrewd guesses. Certain types of records cry out to be kept: in a context of commercial business, board minutes, share registers and related paperwork that record the key decisions made by the organization need to be kept, both for legal reasons but also because of their importance to the company now and in the future. At the other end of the scale of importance, luncheon vouchers and pay slips can be discarded, because they have little or no discernible historical value. But what about the voluminous files of correspondence or financial papers which may better reflect the company’s ethos and, in the longer term, may be of great interest to historians? They are all too often either destroyed in

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their entirety or heavily weeded. In Britain, rare exceptions in the field of banking, for example, are Rothschilds and Barings, where much correspondence and other papers about their business interests across the globe survives in their archives. More typical are the rather uninformative minutes of the Court of Directors of the Colonial Bank, which operated in the Caribbean and Latin America from the 1830s, which offer a very limited insight to British financial interests in the region (see Barclays Group Archives, ref 0038–0001, 0002). Unfortunately, letters from the bank’s branches and agents, which would undoubtedly tell a fuller story, have long since been destroyed. Conversely, many records of the 19th-century London bank Smith, Payne & Smiths survive but their minute books do not (see RBS Heritage Services website). In recent years, the selection of archive material has become contested territory as historians and archivists have questioned the reasons behind the selection and destruction of material. In particular, there has been concern that archivists are not selecting files that reflect the society in which they live. Records management within British government was traditionally conducted by a team of Inspecting Officers from the Public Record Office (PRO), who agreed destruction schedules with departments. Until the 1960s the PRO generally left government departments alone, rarely visiting or offering advice. This was not considered the work for scholars, as the senior staff of the Office regarded themselves. Departments could and did make mistakes in the selection of records. The Home Office, for example, took pride in destroying as much as it could (see The National Archives 1). Meanwhile, between the wars, War Office reviewers managed to consign to oblivion vast swathes of important files, including much about the German Army (Seligmann, 2006, 52–3). In local government, apart from a basic need to keep the council’s minutes and financial records, there was little oversight of archives and each local authority could operate its own recordkeeping policies more or less as the county archivist or county records committee thought fit. In 1954 a report of a committee chaired by Sir James Grigg recommended a thorough overhaul of record management procedures throughout central government. It was followed by the passing of a new Public Records Act in 1958. Thereafter, new records management techniques were introduced across central government departments, with the Public Record

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Office taking an increasingly active role in advising departments about records selection. The Wilson Committee, which reviewed the operation of the public records system in 1980, found that the Grigg system was generally flexible enough to meet very changed circumstances, but called for more resources to be devoted to departmental records management services and the appointment of sector bodies of outside advisors, historians for the most part, to advise on the selection of the records of government (Lord Chancellor’s Department, 1981, 990–2). However, it would be wrong to be complacent. Even in recent years, in the name of good record keeping a great deal has been destroyed or, occasionally, unnecessarily kept. In a recent damning article on the management of legal records since the Grigg Report, British criminologist Paul Rock wrote: One thing that struck us almost immediately, and struck us by surprise, was that whole areas of criminal justice history that might have been documented in that archive are now blank and irretrievable. Over and over again, we stumbled upon voids in the historical evidence, and we all too often found ourselves floundering and foundering. Thus, although the papers of all Royal Commissions and many interdepartmental committees are meticulously preserved, the material that must once have documented the deliberations that initiated them, and the material that documented their consequences, may no longer remain. . . . No doubt much that is lost is of little or no value, but the lacunae that [we] continually encountered are there, and some of them are baffling indeed. (Rock, 2016, 60, 64)

The wrong kind of silence But what if archival institutions have been deliberately collecting the wrong material all along? Should archives ‘continue to be preoccupied with important people, the extraordinary as opposed to the ordinary: “the lives, thoughts, social contribution or even importance of the great majority of people were, for the most part, unwritten and unrecognised” ’ (Johnston, 2001, quoting Laberge, 1987). Many of today’s users want: ‘. . . the minor narratives, the untold stories, the traces, the whispers and the expressions of marginalised identities that people yearn to find in the archives’ (Bastian and Alexander, 2009, xxiii). However, archival institutions have focused on

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the records of the rich and powerful – landowners, politicians and policymakers – material that offers an ordered view of society and the people who ran it. What was usually excluded was the messy, the ephemeral and the voices of people who are not ‘like us’. One notable exception is the long-established Women’s Work Collection at the Imperial War Museum, which consciously reflected the contribution made to the war effort between 1914 and 1918 by women from all levels of society (Wilkinson, 1992). The consequence of this emphasis has been for archives to largely focus on the material created by the great and good and, until well into the post-war period, to ignore the needs of users and potential users who have other interests. The collecting and acquisition policies of archival institutions were slow in making changes to respond to wider needs. In 1999 the Black and Asian Studies Association, for example, examined archival provision in 112 institutions across the UK and concluded that ‘almost no public archives have been able, or have tried, to make a meaningful effort to collect material from Black organisations or people’ (Johnston, 2001, 215). And as late as 2007, British archival scholar Andrew Flinn argued that: ‘in reality the mainstream or formal archive sector does not contain and represent the voices of the non-elites, the grassroots, the marginalised’ (Flinn, 2007, 152). One answer is for groups who feel marginalized to set up their own archives. The concern that archival institutions were not meeting the needs of local communities has led to the establishment of a number of community archives in Britain and other countries. They are spontaneous attempts to preserve and make available a community’s history and struggles, particularly when the community goes ‘through rapid and significant change and feel that they are in the process of losing their identity or having that identity marginalised’ (Flinn, 2007, 159–60). This is often related to a feeling that individual voices are not being heard. Flinn suggests that the link between them is that they: ‘define themselves on the basis of locality, culture, faith, background or other shared identity or interest’ in which ‘community participation, control and ownership is essential’ (Flinn, 2007, 153). In these contexts, the term archive is usually defined very broadly: ‘In particular photographs, film, oral material and the personal ephemera of individual lives all contribute to bringing to life individuals and communities that otherwise lie rather lifeless or without colour in the paper record . . . [which] does not fit well with narrow and

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perhaps overly restrictive professional definitions of records and archives’ (Flinn, 2007, 153, 167). Such initiatives represent a challenge to the traditional archival institution. The vision statement of the Community Archives and Heritage Group in the UK argues that member groups ‘make an invaluable contribution to the preservation of a more inclusive and diverse local and national heritage . . . . [and they] seek to document of all manner of local, occupational, ethnic, faith and other diverse communities’ (see Community Archives and Heritage Group website). These groups reflect a concern, particularly among immigrant communities, that local archival institutions have few records about their experiences and perhaps are perceived as not being interested in collecting such material. Describing the establishment of the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive, the cultural commentator Stuart Hall noted that the absence of any sustained attention or critical dialogue within the dominant institutions of the art world, and a systematic marginalization over the years of work from the Afro-Caribbean and Asian diasporas, meant that the artists themselves have been ‘obliged to act first as curators, and now as archivists’ (Hall, 2001, 89–92). Alternatively, as with various aviation and railway archives, there was a feeling that archival institutions were not interested in preserving specific detailed technical collections, perceived as being ephemeral to the main archive holdings – but of great interest to railway and aviation historians. This is coupled with the wish by communities to use their archives to tell their story in their own way unmediated by professional historians and archivists. As Joan Nestle, a lesbian activist in New York, wrote: ‘the strongest reason for creating the [New York Lesbian] archives was to end the silence of patriarchal history about us – women who loved women – we wanted our story to be told by us, shared by us, and preserved by us’ (quoted in Flinn and Stephens, 2009, 3). The 1970s saw the beginning of a long-running debate about what archives (and archivists) were for. In 1970 the radical American historian Howard Zinn gave a paper to the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in which he contended that the archival record was based around the rich and powerful elements in society, while the ‘poor and impotent’ continued to languish in ‘archival obscurity’. And he urged members of the society ‘to compile a whole new world of documentary

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material about the lives, desires and needs of ordinary people (Ham, 1975, 5). At the meeting the following year the society’s president F. Gerald Ham argued that the archivist’s primary responsibility was to: provide the future with a representative record of human experience in our time . . . If we are not holding up that mirror, if we are not helping people understand the world they live in, and this is not what archives are all about, then I do not know what it is we are doing that is all that important. (Ham, 1975, 13)

Key to this is the selection of the material that will be available to future generations. Terry Cook (2007) noted: ‘We literally are creating archives. We are deciding what is remembered and what is forgotten, who in society is visible and who remains invisible, who has a voice and who does not’. The debate has two different but related aspects. The first discusses the need for archival institutions, local, national and digital, to be as representative of society as possible. The second asks whether archival collection policies also reflect today’s society. In the UK, the Grigg Committee of 1954 thought that the Public Record Office should not preserve records which were solely of genealogical or biographical value. A decade later, in 1965, the Keeper of Public Records, Sir David Evans, asked the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Public Records for guidance on what records relating to individuals should be kept. Evans was concerned about the long-term storage implications of keeping large volumes of records that he felt were of limited interest. The Advisory Council agreed that only the censuses need be preserved in total and that other records, including post-1900 military service records, could be sampled and destroyed. Sampling of records was once seen as being one way forward. It was used to select material from large series of records such as case histories containing material that was thought to be of little value individually, but ‘taken in complete series or in scientific sample can be of very great value to the historian or statistician’ (Wilson, 1982, 988). Records professionals attempted to produce samples on an objective basis. However, it is difficult to eliminate bias from sampling schemes, and some approaches that aimed to be unbiased turned out not to be so (Johnson, Ranade and Thomas, 2014, 227–8). Some samples were simply too small to be of any practical

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value – the records of the Supplementary Benefits Commission which dealt with six million claims a year in the 1980s were sampled and a sample of 200 files was collected at ten-yearly intervals. In the event, sampling of records managed to alienate almost all user groups: many academics need bigger samples than commonly taken in such exercises, or just those relating to their own subject of research. And, when the records are name-rich, genealogists want access to the whole series (Higgs, 1984, 91, 94). To an extent, with the arrival first of microform, and then of digitization services and electronic record keeping, the need for sampling large series of records has been at least partly removed. The Public Record Office decided to sample series of Widow’s War Pension application forms (series PIN 82) and War Pension application forms (PIN 26). Preserving both series in their entirety would have proved invaluable sources for social historians and genealogists alike. But neither the space, nor the technology was then available. Two decades later it was possible to make all of the surviving World War I army service records (WO 363, WO 364) available in 36,000 microform boxes and since 2008 they have been available online. However, The National Archives (TNA) of the UK continues to advocate sampling of a range of records, albeit in a form that is based on value judgements rather than statistical sampling techniques. Its Crown Court Operational Selection Policy (The National Archives, 2014) indicates that Crown Court files dating from 1972 onwards should only be selected for permanent preservation if they concern multiple killings or sexual crimes, cases of media interest, terrorism, large drugs trials or espionage or if they raise particular legal points or are unusual or interesting in some other way. This means that individuals, who commit lesser crimes such as burglary or grievous bodily harm, as well as their victims, are omitted from the permanent record. It also means that it is not possible for researchers to conduct the sort of detailed analysis of crimes and criminal behaviour that is possible for the records of the Central Criminal Court (the ‘Old Bailey records’), which were always treated separately, and where most cases survive. It is, however, an improvement over Assize Court records before the 1950s, whose surviving case files largely relate only to murders. Attitudes have changed, partly as the result of a new generation of archivists, but also because of pressures from the family history community. In 1954 in the UK, the Society of Genealogists told the Grigg Committee

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that, in general, genealogists made little use of records in the Public Record Office (Committee on Departmental Records, 1954, 24). By the 21st century, family historians now account for over 70% of users and are a powerful although not always very vocal lobby, influencing decisions to keep records and to catalogue some collections in much more detail than others, often because they volunteer to do it. Every series of records that contains names is pressed into service. Arguably, such activity is reconfiguring the archive away from being an objective evidential resource into a subjective personal repository (Moss, 2007, 46). Attitudes towards the selection of large series of records primarily with family historians in mind have gradually shifted over the past 50 years and now, the possibilities of digitization mean that the UK’s National Health Service Register (‘1939 Register’), as well as 20th-century military service records, have been preserved in full, and are being made available online by commercial organizations at minimal cost to the host repositories.

The silence of the secret Archives should be a beacon of light. But so often, as this book suggests, this is not the case. There are constant pressures on archivists not to release material, to keep it secret to spare the blushes of the powerful. Against this are the pressures for public archival institutions across the world to provide access to documents that would otherwise remain closed or perhaps be destroyed. How do we approach situations where we really think there are silences that could be filled by material which exists but is not available? One answer is to seek to use legislation. Legislation is, literally, a legitimate way of opening up records. In recent years, across the world, Freedom of Information (FoI) laws have given citizens the legal right to access documents held by governments and some other institutions. In most FoI legislation government information is assumed to be public unless specifically exempt by the law itself, and individuals can access them without explaining why or for what purpose they need them. In short, FoI laws imply a change in the principle of the provision of government information from a ‘need to know’ basis to a ‘right to know’ basis (Ackerman and Sandoval-Ballesteros, 2006, 93). By September 2013, at least 95 countries had Freedom of Information legislation, while a number of

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dependent territories and international organizations also had such legislation in place (see Right2info website). In public, governments of are in favour of FoI, but in practice they are wary of it and its implications. The first modern FoI legislation was adopted in the USA, and signed into law by President Lyndon B Johnson on 4 July 1966. Although Johnson had deep reservations about the legislation, in public he was supportive. An eloquent press statement proclaimed: This legislation springs from one of our most essential principles: A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the Nation permits. No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest. (National Security Archive website, Document 31)

But in private he was very much opposed, telling aides that the ‘goddamn bill will screw the Johnson Administration’ (Ciaramella, 2016). Subsequent legislation and executive orders, notably by President Obama, has strengthened the Act. However, most intelligence records remain off limits. According to Ed Cohen, Director of the Office of Information Management of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sources and methods are ‘the lifeblood of the intelligence business’ and have to be protected: the CIA will: never betray the trust of those who provide it with critical information and the CIA also will not disclose information that could jeopardise other intelligence assets and technical capabilities that are critical to its work. (Bennett, 2002, 29)

Even so Bradley Smith, writing in the late 1990s, claimed that because of the changed circumstances resulting from the end of the Cold War: In the United States historical records of the military and naval intelligence services and the [CIA] were among the first to pass into the custody of the National Archives. By the mid-1990s, American historians were completing studies in intelligence history based on new releases by the US government. (Smith, 1999, 170)

Indeed it is now possible to download some carefully chosen historical

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documents from the CIA’s ‘Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room’ and put in a request for release of closed material. The UK government unfortunately has a different culture, one of ingrained secrecy at the heart of government. According to the British journalist Ian Cobain: the application of official secrecy in Britain has, for the past couple of centuries, gone far beyond that which is required for the safe and secure business of government. Official secrecy is not merely rooted in the preferences and practices of those in government. It is integral to public life. Britain is not a nation where official information is merely kept closed on occasion and handled with care: it is a nation where a culture of secrecy runs wide and deep. (Cobain, 2016, xii)

After a long campaign, Tony Blair’s government in 2000 finally enacted FoI legislation in the UK. Again, senior politicians were against it. In his memoirs, Blair later wrote: ‘Freedom of Information: Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my head till it drops off my shoulders. You idiot. You naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it’ (quoted in Cobain, 2016, 156). Blair claimed that his antipathy to FoI lay in the fact that it would be used by journalists to attack politicians: ‘For political leaders, it’s like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a stick “Hey, use this instead” and handing them a mallet instead.’ He managed to delay its implementation for four years (Cobain, 2016, 156). Blair was probably worrying unnecessarily: the British act was less rigorous than its American equivalent, with many more exemptions. In 2015 the British government set up an Independent Commission on Freedom of Information to review the Act’s workings. There were fears that the Commission would restrict access yet further, but its members found the system was generally working well, although they declined to take the opportunity to extend it to departments that had been exempted from the original legislation (Independent Commission on Freedom of Information, 2016). FoI legislation has been seen by some as a solution to the so-called ‘accountability deficit’, particularly in newly created democracies, where

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citizens have little real power other than the right to remove governments at the time of national elections (Ackerman and Sandoval-Ballesteros, 2006, 85). With this in mind, other writers have argued that FoI presents a radical opportunity to ‘punctuate’ existing organizational equilibrium, thereby enabling strategic change in the ways that information is valued and managed within public bodies (Burt and Taylor, 2007, 181). In this way, FoI has opened up regimes to transparency and accountability, and given additional legitimacy to records and archives. Though imperfect in execution, FoI is still a powerful tool in the armoury of the researcher. In countries where FoI is in force, it has changed the relationship between the public, the archival institution and public agencies. It has forced the release of certain historic material that otherwise would remain closed. Statistics provided by The National Archives (England and Wales) reveal that use of the FoI Act between 2013 and September 2015 led to the release of 3,514 records out of 6,731 requests to the Archives. In addition, another 1,038 files were partially released, often with minor redactions. And in some cases it has made the archival institution irrelevant as journalists and concerned citizens bypass it to deal with the organization which created the information directly, although there are certain wide-ranging exemptions which usually come into play where some harm might result if the information was to be released, such as releasing private details about an individual. This has lasting implications for silences within the archives in how repositories will be used in future and for records management and collection policies (Shepherd, Stevenson and Flinn, 2010, 343). At the heart of FoI is a dilemma. What needs to be kept secret for operational reasons and what can, and should, be released? In a Congressional hearing John D. Moss, the driving force behind the introduction of FoI in the USA, summed up the dilemma: ‘No one would want to throw open government files that exposed national defence secrets to enemy eyes’, but neither should government ‘impose the iron hand of censorship on routine information, even information that might embarrass public officials’ (Lemov, 2011). In the USA, FoI legislation received a shock, from which it is still recovering, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in October 2001, significantly enhanced the powers of the intelligence services and limited access to their records. In an article for The Nation Bruce Shapiro suggested that:

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From four-star generals to lowly webmasters, [Washington] is in information lockdown. Never in the nation’s history has the flow of information from government to press and public been shut off so comprehensively and quickly as in the weeks following September 11. Much of the shutdown seems to have little to do with preventing future terrorism and everything to do with the Administration’s laying down a new across-the-board standard for centralized control of the public’s right to know. (Shapiro, 2001)

He argued that edicts from the then Attorney General John Ashcroft were in effect creating a ‘born secret’ standard; in the words of the Federation of American Scientists, the order ‘appears to exploit the current circumstances’ to turn the FoI Act into an Official Secrets Act. If the American system relating to intelligence records is still largely predicated on openness, the opposite is true in Britain, where it was not until 1989 that the intelligence services were put on a legal footing. Access to the records is very limited. Only the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has released the bulk of its archives up until the beginning of the Cold War. The Security Service (MI5) has transferred about 5800 files to The National Archives, largely relating to the monitoring of spies and potential enemies of the state from the 1930s through into the Cold War, many of which have been heavily redacted. This is about 1% of its known archives (Cobain, 2016, 243–4). However, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) has not formally released any archival material. Along with Special Forces units, it has a blanket exemption to keep its archives away from public scrutiny. In February 1998, the then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who was responsible for SIS, explained in a written answer to the House of Commons that he ‘recognised the overwhelmingly strong reason for the policy, adding that when individuals or organisations co-operate with SIS they do so because an unshakable commitment is given never to reveal their identities’ (Bennett, 2002, 26). Most of MI6’s archives created before World War II appear to have been destroyed (Bennett, 2002, 28). As Cobain points out, this blanket ban stretches credulity; that records of the Agadir Crisis of 1911 or on German pre-1914 naval intentions are still inaccessible is absurd (Cobain, 2016, 245). It is not possible to totally screen off the intelligence services from the rest of government or society as a whole. Often the results of doing so end

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in farce, at least so far as archives are concerned. In the USA, in the ‘information lockdown’ after the 2001 attacks, many files were suddenly closed. At Duke University in North Carolina, Anne Miller, the public documentation librarian, was suddenly ordered to withdraw a disc: ‘It concerned [details of] national water supplies, but we weren’t asked to withdraw the CD-ROM on state water supplies, which we also have. And this notice only applied to depository libraries. What if one of our geologists or geographers had purchased a copy? They didn’t have to return it. So it was a little odd’ (Duke University, 2002). In Britain reviewers redact pages or blank out references to MI6 in documents from other government departments being transferred to The National Archives, although knowledgeable researchers can sometimes work out the names of the agents whose details have been redacted. The intelligence services are not the only part of British government to retain huge collections of material. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) maintains a considerable secret archive at Swadlincote in the English Midlands (Cobain, 2016, 154). It is mainly an intermediate repository keeping files before they are destroyed or transferred to The National Archives. But according to an article in The Observer: The hidden archive includes what is described as ‘hundreds and hundreds of boxes’, each containing about 10 files, that were sent to the warehouse when the British army’s Northern Ireland headquarters closed four years ago. One MoD archivist describes it as looking like ‘the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark’, in which box after box can be seen stretching into the distance. (Cobain, 2013)

A huge collection of material, known as the Non-Standard Files or the Special Collections, some of it dating back to the Crimean War of the 1850s, is still held by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). There are probably 600,000 files awaiting transfer to The National Archives, destruction or, inevitably in a few cases, retention by the department. Transferring the whole collection would double the current holdings of Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office records already available at The National Archives. An inventory is available online which gives a tantalizing glimpse into the treasures that await researchers when the material is finally transferred, from Palestine Police medal awards to

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the evacuation of West Berlin in case of war (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2014). Unfortunately, because of cuts in establishment and lack of political will, it may be decades before the records finally arrive at The National Archives. The FCO announced in 2014 that it would transfer 10% of the documents it considered of greatest interest in the next decade (Cobain, 2016, 136–9). A more insidious way of maintaining the secrecy of the archives is the failure to transfer material that is due to be released. In the UK, the Public Records Act 1958 instructed government departments to transfer material to the Public Record Office after 50 years. In 1968 this was reduced to 30 years. A further review in the late 2000s led to the decision to reduce this to 20 years. In order to minimize the effect on departments this was to be phased in over a ten-year period. Over the past few years there has been a change in making files available after 30 years at The National Archives. Much more has been retained by departments. Of files created between 1972 and 1974 by MoD, the Cabinet Office, the FCO, and the Prime Minister’s Office, about 6% are still closed or retained in their department of origin (2606 out of 41,320), but for files between 1982 and 1984 around 14% are still closed or retained (6081 out of 44,267). It is noticeable that both MoD and the Prime Minister’s Office have transferred far fewer files from the 1980s than they did for the same period of the 1970s. This may be partly explained, but only in part, by the Falklands War of 1982, the Miners’ Strike of 1984, and ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, as these events still have a resonance in modern Britain or affect diplomatic relations. And what is The National Archives doing to ensure that departments obey both the letter and the spirit of the law? On the surface, it is not doing much. In September 2015 responsibility for its records management work was transferred to the Cabinet Office, one of the departments most prone to retaining material, while the remainder of The National Archives was transferred from the Ministry of Justice to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, which operates from The National Archives, is meant to review proposals for the retention and closure of material. In 2015–16 it rejected central government’s wishes in just 16 out of 5378 cases (Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, 2016). In addition, The National Archives has a Reclosure Panel that can reclose material that has already been opened.

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In 2014, 32 documents were closed out of 40 requests made by government departments largely because of personal sensitivity (TNA, 2015). Citizens and taxpayers are entitled to know what is being undertaken on their behalf. As the American historian Richard Breitman pointed out: Governments that withhold critical information from the historical record and the public after the events do their countries and the world no service. But the habit of secrecy is hard to break. No democratic politician or official can control future assessments of him or her by historians, but the longer critical sources are kept secret, the longer such control is possible. (Breitman, 1999, 246)

Archival institutions and archives themselves are one way in which we hold politicians and bureaucrats to account, even if it is at a remove of 30 years or more. FoI legislation coupled with the earlier release of material has made it easier, but if governments give with one hand, they often take away with the other. When government agencies are allowed to keep their records in secret for perpetuity, or selectively release material that reflects well on their work, without being challenged by historians and the archival community, then this damages the institution of the archive. Archivists and users need to be vigilant to ensure that as many documents as possible are available for public access. The worst Silence of the Archive is secrecy.

The silence of destruction The ultimate Silence of the Archive is the silence of destruction. If files are destroyed, then the value of archives as a means of allowing the public to call its governments and officials to account is diminished. Records management systems and records managers exist to ensure that the appropriate files survive. This is particularly important in a democracy, as the Australian Society of Archivists affirmed in 1997: The operation of a free and democratic society depends upon the maintenance of the integrity of the public record. Public records are a key source of information about government actions and decisions. They provide essential evidence of the exercise of public trust by public officials. This in turn helps ensure public accountability and protection of the rights of citizens. (Heiner Affair website)

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But sometimes politicians and other powerful individuals have other ideas. In the UK there was embarrassment in 2014 when the Home Office admitted that it had destroyed private office papers relating to allegations of child abuse presented by the former Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens to the then Home Secretary Leon Brittan in 1984. An enquiry conducted by Peter Wanless and Richard Whittam found no evidence that the material still survived or that there was any maliciousness behind their destruction, but their work had been compromised by poor records management by the department: Inside the Home Office, filing conventions and record keeping methods used during the period place significant limitations on our ability to re-establish a perfect record of what was known to the Home Office at the time that must necessarily condition any observations we make. It is, therefore, not possible to say whether files were ever removed or destroyed to cover up or hide allegations of organized or systematic child abuse by particular individuals because of the systems then in place. It follows that we cannot say that no file was removed or destroyed for that reason. By making those observations they should not be misinterpreted. We do not conclude that there is any basis for thinking that anything happened to files that should not have happened to them, but identify that limitation in our review . . . We found nothing specific to support a concern that the Home Office had failed in any organised or deliberate way to identify and refer individual allegations of child abuse to the police. (Wanless and Whittam, 2014, 7)

Terry Cook (2002) described how in 1985, the world of Canadian archives was rocked by allegations that vital records which might have revealed the presence in Canada of ex-Nazis, including the notorious Josef Mengele, had been destroyed. Pressure from anti-Nazi investigators had persuaded the Canadian government to set up a Commission of Inquiry into the matter and there was some concern that the bulk destruction of files which had taken place in 1982 had been part of a cover-up. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police felt that its investigation had been hampered by this and the press took it up with headlines such as ‘Nazi Inquiry Told Vital Files Were Destroyed “Mysteriously” ’. The Winnipeg Free Press described it as a scandalous act, while the Toronto Star talked of the mysterious destruction of vital files. The chair of the Royal Commission was so concerned that he devoted a day of hearings to the matter. He concluded that the immigration

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case files did not contain material which would have been very useful in the hunt for Nazi war criminals because the files did not contain documents or information relating to events prior to the immigrants’ landing in Canada. Moreover, there was no evidence that immigrants had been asked about their membership of the Nazi party and so there was no prospect of deporting large numbers of them for lying when completing the immigration form. There had been a large-scale destruction in 1982 because the Canadian Immigration department had disbanded its file retention and disposal unit in 1977 and re-established it in 1981. The largescale destruction in 1982 was simply dealing with the backlog. No evidence of a conspiracy or cover-up was found. The Public Archives Canada defended itself by arguing that most records have to be destroyed for reasons of space and that the destruction of these papers had been properly considered, authorized and documented. Moreover, a statistically significant sample of the files had been saved from destruction to provide evidence of processes and procedures and daily operations. The Public Archives of Canada undertook a well-orchestrated publicity campaign to defend its position; in doing so, it was concerned that bad publicity might damage the new Archives Bill which was going through the Canadian Parliament. Not everybody was satisfied, however; David Matas, a human rights lawyer and Jewish advocate, was deeply unhappy with the decision and criticized the official record retention and destruction policies which, he said, mirrored the government’s apathy when it came to banishing war criminals from the country. To concerns that it would have been hugely expensive to store this vast accumulation of paper, Matas said that the files could have been microfilmed as the Americans had done with their equivalent files. Cook noted that Matas had underlined the politicized and controversial nature of appraisal and the related destruction of records and how accountability and public policy can be thwarted by action (or inaction) by records managers and archivists. He also made the point that every record created has some potential use to someone and no one can predict all the possible uses decades after creation. The public furore over the destruction of these files led to major changes at the Public Archives of Canada; procedures and documentation were tightened up and a new and more sensitive appraisal concept called ‘macroappraisal’ was introduced. This finds value through a functional analysis of society, its major institutions and the interaction of citizens with those institutions.

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There are examples from many countries of archives being destroyed (or allegedly destroyed) to protect well known people, including sporting heroes. According to Douglas Booth (2006), the Australian swimmer and triple Olympic gold medal winner, Dawn Frazer was banned for ten years by the Australian Swimming Union in 1965 following a report by Bill Slade, manager of the Australian swimming team at the Tokyo Olympics. Quite why Frazer was banned after Tokyo is not in the public domain and Slade’s report, which is in the archives of the Australian Olympic Committee, has been mutilated and all references to her behaviour in Tokyo deleted. The British royal family may also have engaged in acts of destruction, starting with Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria, who edited her mother’s journal, censoring and cutting as she went, and destroyed the originals (Ward, 2014, 10). The Royal Archives is keen to stress that this was done, ‘at Queen Victoria’s own request’ after the monarch’s death in 1901 (see Queen Victoria’s Journals website). According to William Shawcross’s official biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, her daughter Princess Margaret had looked through her mother’s archives and destroyed a lot of potentially sensitive material. According to a journalist writing for the Daily Telegraph: Shawcross’s book contains the first confirmation that letters from the Princess of Wales were among the material destroyed. He writes: ‘Princess Margaret was engaged on one of her periodic “sortings” of her mother’s papers.’ In a letter to her mother, who was staying at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, the Princess wrote: ‘I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. Keeping the letters for you to sort later.’ Shawcross writes: ‘On the Princess’s orders, large black bags of papers were taken away for destruction rather than for ultimate consignment to the Royal Archives. There is no record of just what was thus lost but Princess Margaret later told Lady Penn . . . that among the papers she had destroyed were letters from the Princess of Wales to Queen Elizabeth – because they were so private, she said. No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint.’ (Rayner, 2009)

One of the most notorious cases of alleged destruction is the so-called Shreddergate, the Australian Heiner affair. In 1989, a former magistrate, Noel Heiner, was asked to conduct an inquiry into complaints by the staff of the

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John Oxley Youth Detention Centre in Queensland. The complaints centred round the management style of the relatively new director of the centre. The inquiry was begun in the final days of Russell Cooper’s National Party government in 1989. Following the General Election and the change of government, Heiner’s inquiry was wound up. However, the director of the centre, Peter Coyne, apparently believed that the documents produced by Heiner contained allegations against him. He asked to see them, but was not allowed to do so. The Queensland government was apparently concerned that the documents might be used as the basis of a defamation claim by Coyne and that the way the Heiner inquiry had been set up did not provide Heiner or his informants with indemnity against such an action. The Queensland Cabinet agreed that the remaining papers of the Heiner report should be destroyed. The approval of the State Archivist was obtained within a period of 24 hours and the documents were shredded (Hurley, 2002). The decision to shred the documents was very controversial. Some people have alleged that they were destroyed in order to cover up sexual abuse at the Detention Centre. There has been a vociferous campaign, led by former union official Kevin Lindeberg, for an inquiry into the destruction of the records. According to one writer, quoted by Australian archivist Chris Hurley, ‘After the election, it became apparent that the allegations revealed details of inmate abuse that, if disclosed, would reflect unfavourably not only upon the beleaguered Coyne (and the government that had employed him), but also on the staff who participated in the abuse, the union to which they belonged, and the responsible department’ (Hurley, 2002, 312). However, the problem with destroying documents is that their content remains if not unknowable, very hard to discover and so speculation can rapidly gain the force of established truth. In 2013, lawyer Tim Carmody (State of Queensland, 2013) conducted an inquiry into the matter. He found that, while there had been an incident of alleged sexual misconduct by inmates of the Centre, this had been fully investigated at the time with police involvement. His investigation mainly focused on the decision by the Queensland Cabinet to destroy the Heiner records. He said that on the question of whether there was any evidence suggesting that the Cabinet decision to destroy the records was a response of, or action taken by, the executive government in relation to child sexual abuse allegations, there was no factual basis logically supporting a reasonable suspicion or rational belief. He added that ‘Speculation or suggestions to the contrary are

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scandalous, disingenuous and groundless’. Carmody also looked at the legal question of whether the Cabinet had acted appropriately in authorizing the destruction of the records (State of Queensland, 2013, 8). In his report, he said: ‘Even if it is properly characterised as the honest but ill-advised act of a newly-elected government, Cabinet Decision No. 162 of 1990 caused the destruction of public records which from a governance and public administration perspective fell short of the relevant standard of appropriateness; that is, “fit and proper” ’.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed many varied reasons for the silences that are to be found in archives. Some are historic – records were destroyed or partially lost before the arrival of effective records management systems. Some are political – records are destroyed or retained to please one group or another. And some relate to the changing nature of archival institutions over nearly 200 years. Until the 1970s and perhaps later in some cases, collecting policies favoured the acquisition of records that reflected the perspectives of governments or of rich and powerful organizations, families and individuals. Only from the 1970s has there been a genuine desire at most archival institutions to reflect wider aspects of the society outside the reading room door, by interacting with groups which do not traditionally use the archive.

References and further reading Ackerman, J. M. and Sandoval-Ballesteros, E. (2006) The Global Explosion of Freedom of Information Laws, Administrative Law Review, 58, 85–130. Advisory Council on National Records and Archives (2016) Annual Report 2015–16, 112, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/annual-report-andaccounts-2015-2016.pdf. Bailkin, J. (2015) Where Did the Empire Go? Archives and decolonisation in Britain, American Historical Review, 120 (3), 884–99. Banton, M. (2012) Destroy? ‘Migrate’? Conceal? British strategies for the disposal of sensitive records of colonial administrations at independence’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (2), 321–35. Barclays Group Archives, ref 0038–0001, 0002.

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Bastian, J. A. (2003) Owning Memory: how a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history, Libraries Unlimited. Bastian J. A. and Alexander, B. (2009) Introduction. In Bastian J. A. and Alexander, B. (eds), Community Archives: the shaping of memory, Facet Publishing, xxi–xxiv. Bell, P. and Stitt, F. (2002) George Herbert Fowler and County Records, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 23 (2), 249–64. Bennett, G. (2002) Declassification and Release Policies of the UK’s Intelligence Agencies, Intelligence and National Security, 17 (1), 21–32. Bey, L. (2016) Lost Cities #8: mystery of Cahokia – why did North America’s largest city vanish?, The Guardian, 17 August, www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/17/lost-cities-8-mystery-ahokia-illinoismississippians-native-americans-vanish. Black, I. (2006) Secrets and Lies at the Heart of Britain’s Middle Eastern Folly, The Guardian, 11 July, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jul/11/egypt.past. Bloch, M. (1953) The Historian’s Craft, Knopf. Booth, D. (2006) Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the archive, Sport in History, 26 (1), 91–109. Breitman, R. (1999) Official Secrets: what the Nazis planned, what the British and Americans knew, Allen Lane. Burt, E. and Taylor, J. (2007) The Freedom of Information [Scotland] Act 2002: new modes of information management in Scottish public bodies?, University of St. Andrews and Glasgow Caledonian University. Cantwell, J. D. (1991) The Public Record Office 1838–1958, HMSO. Cary, A. (2011) Cary Report on the Release of the Colonial Administration Files, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 32969/migrated-archives.pdf. Ciaramella, C. J. (2016) The Freedom of Information Act – and the Hero Who Pioneered It, Pacific Standard, 29 June, https://psmag.com/the-freedom-ofinformation-act-and-the-hero-who-pioneered-it-868e5b55e7b6#.r39bf9483. Cobain, I. (2013) Ministry of Defence holds 66,000 Files in Breach of 30-year Rule, The Observer, 6 October, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/06/ ministry-of-defence-files-archive. Cobain, I. (2016) The History Thieves: secrets, lies and the shaping of a modern nation, Portobello. Committee on Departmental Records (UK) (1954) (Grigg Committee), Cmd 9163.

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Community Archives and Heritage Group, www.communityarchives.org.uk/content/about/history-and-purpose. Cook, T. (2002) A Monumental Blunder: the destruction of records on Nazi war criminals in Canada. In Cox, J. and Wallace, D. A. (eds) Archives and the Public Good: accountability and records in modern society, Quorum Books. Cook, T. (2007) Remembering the Future: appraisal of records and the role of archives in constructing social memory. In Blouin, F. X. and Rosenburg, W. G. (eds), Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: essays from the Sawyer Seminar, University of Michigan Press. Cook, T. (2011) We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are: archival appraisal past, present and future, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32 (2), 173–89. Cox, J. (1993) Hatred Pursued Beyond the Grave, HMSO. Duke University (2002) Information Lockdown, Duke Magazine, 30 November, http://dukemagazine.duke.edu/article/information-lockdown. Flinn, A. (2007) Community Histories, Community Archives: some opportunities and challenges, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 28 (2), 151–76. Flinn, A. (2011) Archival Activism: independent and community-led archives: radical public history and the heritage professions, InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 70, 1–20. Flinn, A. and Stevens M. (2009) ‘It is noh Mistri, Wi Mekin Histri’ Telling Our Own Story: independent and community archives in the UK challenging and subverting the mainstream. In Bastian J. A. and Alexander B. (eds), Community Archives: the shaping of memory, Facet Publishing, 3–27. Flower, C. T. (1943) Manuscripts and the War, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, 25, 18–32. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2014) FCO Archive Inventory, March, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 288616/Archive_inventory_for_publication_v.3.0_FINAL_csv.csv/preview. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2015) FCO Non-standard Files: a guide to non-standard files outside the standard FCO corporate file plan, www.gov.uk/guidance/fco-non-standard-files. Fowler, S. (2011) Tracing your Army Ancestors, Pen & Sword. France 24 (2015) France to Open Nazi-era Collaboration Files, www.france24.com/en/20151228-france-opens-nazi-collaboration-era-filesgermany-vichy-world-war-two.

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Geiger, T., Moore, N. and Savage, M. (2010) The Archive in Question, CRESC Working Paper No. 81, 23, www.cresc.ac.uk/medialibrary/workingpapers/wp81.pdf. Hall, H. (1925) British Archives and the Sources for the History of the World War, Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (2001) Constituting an Archive, Third Text, 15 (4). Ham, F. G. (1975) The Archival Edge, The American Archivist, 38 (1), 5–13. Harris, V. (1997) Claiming Less, Delivering More: a critique of positivist formulations on archives in South Africa, Archivaria, 44, 132–41. Harris, V. (2002) The Archival Sliver: power, memory and archives in South Africa, Archival Science, 2, 63–86. Heiner Affair website, http://heineraffair.info/site_pages/heiner_affair_role_of_state_archives.html. Hennessy, P. (1986) The Secrets Which Will Stay Secret For Ever, The Listener, 11 September, 8–9. Higgs, E. (1984) Particular Instance Papers: the historical and archival dimensions, Social History, 10, 89–94. Honohan, P. (2010) The Irish Banking Crisis Regulatory and Financial Stability Policy 2003–2008, www.bankinginquiry.gov.ie/The%20Irish%20Banking%20Crisis%20 Regulatory%20and%20Financial%20Stability%20Policy%202003-2008.pdf. Hopkins, N. S. (1997) Memories of Griots, Alif: Memories of Contemporary Poetics, 17, 43–72. Hurley, C. (2002) Records and the Public Interest: the ‘Heiner Affair’ in Queensland, Australia. In Cox, J. and Wallace, D. A. (eds) Archives and the Public Good: accountability and records in modern society, Quorum Books. Independent Commission on Freedom of Information (2016) Report, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 504139/Independent_Freedom_of_Information_Commission_Report.pdf. Johnston, I. (2001) Whose History is it Anyway?, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 22 (2), 312–29. Johnson, V., Ranade, R. and Thomas, D. (2014) Size Matters: the implications of volume for the digital archive of tomorrow – a case study from the UK National Archives, Records Management Journal, 24 (3), 206–37. Ketelaar E. (2008), Archives as Spaces of Memory, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 29 (1), 9–27. Ketelaar, E. (2013) Travels Into and Out of the Record, Archives, 39, 17–29.

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Laberge, D. (1987) Information, Knowledge and Rights: the preservation of archives as a political and social issue, Archivaria, 25, 44–50. Lemov, M. (2011) The Freedom of Information Act on its 45th Anniversary, Nieman Watchdog, www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view& backgroundid=00559. Lord Chancellor’s Department (UK) (1981) Modern Public Records: selection and access, Cmnd 8204 (Wilson Committee), HMSO. Lukacs, J. (2001) Five Days in London May 1940, Yale. MacMillan, M. (2015) History’s People: personalities and the past, Profile Books. Moss, M. (2007) Choreographed Encounters – the archive and public history, Archives, 32, 41–7. Moss, M. (2012) Where have all the Files Gone? Lost in Action Points Every One?, Journal of Contemporary History, 47 (4), 860–75. National Archives of the United States (2016) Private communication to David Thomas, 8 January. National Security Archive, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB194/Document%2031.pdf. Panzacchi, C. (1994) The Livelihoods of Griots in Modern Senegal, Africa, 64, 190–210. Parry, M. (2016) Uncovering the Brutal Truth about the British Empire, The Guardian, 18 August, www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncoveringtruth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau. Queen Victoria’s Journals, www.queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do. Rayner, G. (2009) Princess Margaret destroyed letters from Diana to Queen Mother, Daily Telegraph, 17 September, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/6198996/PrincessMargaret-destroyed-letters-from-Diana-to-Queen-Mother.html. RBS Heritage Services, Smith, Payne & Smiths, http://heritagearchives.rbs.com/companies/list/smith-payne-and-smiths.html. Right2info, www.right2info.org. Rock, P. (2016) A Brief History of Records Management at The National Archives, Legal Information Management, 16, 60–4. Seligmann, M. S. (2006) Hors de Combat: the management, mismanagement and mutilation of the War Office archive, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 84, 52–8. Shapiro, B. (2001) Information Lockdown, The Nation, 25 October,

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www.thenation.com/article/information–lockdown. Shepherd, E. (2012) Archives and Archivists in Twentieth Century England, Ashgate. Shepherd, E., Stevenson, S. and Flinn, F. (2010) Information Governance, Records Management, and Freedom of Information: a study of local government authorities in England, Government Information Quarterly, 27, 337–45. Smith, B. (1999) New Intelligence Releases: a British side to the story, Intelligence and National Security, 14 (1), 168–75. State of Queensland (2013) Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry, 3(e) Report, www.childprotectioninquiry.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0019/ 202627/3e–Report–FINAL–for–web.pdf. Stoler, A. L. (2002) Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: on the content in the form. In Hamilton, C. and Harris, V. (eds), Refiguring the Archive, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 83–101. The National Archives 1, HO 45/10456/B17510. The National Archives (2006) Release of Suez Records: the Sèvres Protocol, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/releases/2006/december/sevres.htm. The National Archives (2014) Crown Court Operational Selection Policy, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information– management/osp40final.pdf. The National Archives (2015) Reclosure Panel, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/our–role/transparency/reclosure–panel. Trouillot, M.-R. (2015) Silencing the Past: power and the production of history, 2nd rev. edn (20th anniversary edn), Beacon Press. Wanless, P. and Whittam, R. (2014) An Independent Review of Two Home Office Commissioned Independent Reviews Looking at Information Held in Connection with Child Abuse from 1979–1999, www.gov.uk/government/publications/ the-peter-wanless-and-richard-whittam-qc-review. Ward, Y. M. (2014) Censoring Queen Victoria: how two gentlemen edited a queen and created an icon, Oneworld Publications. Wilkinson, M. (1992) Patriotism and Duty: the Women’s Work Collection at the Imperial War Museum, Imperial War Museum Review, 6, 1–9. Wilson, D. (1982) Public Records: the Wilson Report and the White Paper, The Historical Journal, 25 (4), 985–94.

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CHAPTER 2 Inappropriate expectations Simon Fowler

Introduction This chapter focuses on the user experience of archives and what this can tell us about the Silence of the Archive. Users work with an incomplete archive, whether material has been deliberately or accidentally destroyed, information still closed, or data just not recorded in the first place. Jessica Myerson says that: ‘Archives contain slivers of the historical events or processes that can be reconstructed and configured to give users of the archives . . . a window through which they can view the past’ (Myerson, Galloway and Bias, 2012, 1). To the historian what survives and what has been destroyed can sometimes seem to be frustratingly random. But can a pattern be discerned? In this chapter, we will be looking at the user’s experience of the Silence of the Archive: what has survived and why, as well as exploring what has been lost. We will also consider what the records cannot tell us and see whether any clues can be found in differing Western record-creating traditions. Perhaps the cataloguing process or the descriptions themselves hinder finding the records. The chapter concentrates on traditional paper records, which are those still handled by the vast majority of people who visit archival institutions. Louise Craven (2008, 11) raised the question of the role of archives in facilitating identity construction. For some people, they are clearly essential. During the months and years after the collapse of the German Democratic

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Republic, citizens demanded to see the files kept on them by the Stasi, the East German secret police. According to Eric Ketelaar: For these people, the files . . . were their files, the means to prove the wrong they had suffered, changing them from victim into plaintiff. . . . By destroying the file – or when access to the file is denied – one loses the means to prove the wrong, staying a victim for ever. (Ketelaar, 2008, 13–14)

Indeed, many users struggle to come to terms with the fact that records relating to their families either no longer exist or were never created. They may fall into the trap of believing that things only happened, or only exist, if they are documented. As Sue Breakell of Brighton University said, ‘in many popular uses of the word archive there has been a blurring of boundaries to the point that archives have become at times a stand-in for, or a physical representation of history, or the accumulation of past events’ (Breakell, 2011, 27). As we will see in Chapter 6, for some, the destruction of particular records may be traumatic and make it impossible for them to come to terms with the past, particularly when dealing with catastrophic events such as abuse or abandonment (Etherton, 2006).

‘Writing lived lives’: the skewing of the archive record Our view of the past is subtly skewed by the existence, or more often the lack, of archival material. Many aspects of British life in the past are largely unrepresented in the archive – where are the records which would tell us about entertainment in pubs or the workings of the building trade? The great British cultural historian Raphael Samuel wrote: The reason why history has so often a bureaucratic bias is not I think because of a particular bias of individual historians, but very largely because bureaucratic documents are the ones most often preserved. The reason why so much of the history of the English is the history of property is because in English county record offices so many documents are deeds. Historians have very often simply followed the lines suggested by the documents. (Samuel, 1972, 119–20)

The naval historian Nicholas Rodger said that ‘The first parents of every archive were bureaucracy and accountancy’. And, with regard to naval

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record keeping: ‘Accountancy continued for many centuries to be the prime motive for the creation and preservation of naval documents’ (Rodger, 2007, 109). So, historians may need to turn to diaries, letters and other private papers to add colour to the black-and-white images provided by formal bureaucratic and financial records. Our knowledge of Charles II and his administration in the 1660s, for example, is greatly enhanced by the diaries of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Even these sources have their limits: diarists or letter-writers may feel constrained by circumstances. And it is a rare writer who can rise above the mundane. J. E. R. Parsons kept a diary while he was a prisoner of the Japanese in Sumatra during World War II. In the introduction to the transcript, which he subsequently presented to the Imperial War Museum, he wrote: Had the diary been found by the guards the consequences for me would have been somewhat unpleasant; this necessitated recording only those events to which the Japanese would not take too violent exception . . . In retrospect, I feel that I was altogether too concerned with the state of my health, not expectedly food or rather the lack of it, loomed larger the longer we were in captivity . . . to my shame they [the diaries] often appear querulous and self-centred but that was how I was affected by some unpleasant times. (Parsons, n.d.)

For readers, however, his diary offers a unique and very moving insight into a shameful episode in modern history. Other historians take a different line, seeing silences as consequence of the power relation between the creators of archives and historians. The French historian Sonia Combe spoke about the ‘repressed archive’ that reinforces ‘the power of the state over the historian’ (Habib, 2008, 10). Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote on the liberation struggle of the slaves of Haiti, noted the silences in the creation of the archival sources, the things left out, not deliberately, but because at the time they seemed peripheral and not important to the central historical narrative that was taking place. But he too saw this silencing as an example of the use of power: Silences are inherent in the creation of sources, the first moment of historical production. Unequal control over historical productions obtains also in the second moment of historical production, the making of archives and documents. (Quoted in Bastian, 2003, 8–9)

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Historians will share American academic Bryant Simon’s frustration with archives after he stumbled on a letter in the South Carolina State Archives. Written by a small-town lawyer and magistrate and addressed to the Governor, the letter refers to a dual lynching in 1912 and points to a ‘grizzly tale of murder charged with political partisanship, class resentments, and homo-eroticism’. But beyond this letter the archives are silent. Newspapers provide some key details and enabled Simon to fill in a few gaps, but not enough to tell a story ‘with a plot and characters and drama . . . that is, what we conventionally think of as a historical narrative’. But Simon’s desire ‘to tell the story of the lynching . . . to explore what happened, to understand desire and sex in the turn-of-the-century South, to understand why people killed other people’ floundered on the lack of evidence (Simon, 2001, 432). Similarly, the historian Robert Colley described the almost total non-survival of the records of the mid-Victorian income tax in Britain: The ephemerae such as discrete returns or assessments discovered sporadically in archival deposits may often act as tiny lanterns in a dark world in the absence of anything more substantial, but these are no more than isolated fragments which, although of utility, contribute in only a minor way to a scientific understanding of the wider scheme of taxation. (Colley, 2000, 75)

Perhaps as well as the survival of records being the result of the exercise of power, there is also a kind of tidy-mindedness that seeks to impose an order on the chaos of the past. The American historian Kate Eichhorn warns that: If any collection can be an archive, we risk losing sight of an important distinction between carefully constructed and highly regulated collections that produce ‘official’ narratives about the past and shape people’s lives in the present and random collections of objects and documents that bring pleasure to the collector but have little or no impact on the larger order of things. (Eichhorn, 2008)

But for many pieces of research, records only survive in random collections outside official structures. One of the authors of this book is interested in the history of the Red House Society, a large charity concerned with the relief of imprisoned debtors in the UK in the 19th century. In the absence

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of the Society’s full archives, his search involves looking for traces in private collections, hospital records and other quite random sources.

When silence means silence: what records cannot tell us Researchers inevitably have high hopes of what the records will tell them. Archivists will be familiar with questions asked by members of the public for which there are no obvious answers. Writing about his experiences in the Round Room at the Public Record Office’s Chancery Lane building in London in the late 1950s, medieval historian R. Allen Brown described the questions he was bombarded with: One of the many frustrations of this kind of situation, however, is the alarming realisation that the searcher may be right, though for all the wrong reasons: that there may well be in, in the vast accumulations of the Public Records, information relating to [the] Smith [family], or even relating to the bed or the warming pan of the Old Pretender, or to the pillow which smothered the Princes in the Tower, or the axe which beheaded Charles, King and Martyr, or whatever the hopeful quest might be. What matters is to know where to look . . . But if on those occasions you make bold to enumerate the hazards strewing the path of the would-be-searcher, or point out the vastness of the haystack and the minuteness of the needle, you may well find a lack of comprehension or a certain coolness springing up. (Brown, 1960, 2)

In many cases, researchers assume that the types of records we are familiar with today were the same or similar in the past. Mark Osiel wrote about the archives left by the post-war Nuremberg Tribunal that ‘Historians, whether focused on impersonal structures of complicity or intimate survivors’ sensibilities, have found that the legal record of Nuremberg and other such trials, gathered with a view to criminal prosecution, is not particularly useful for current purposes of description or explanation’ (Ketelaar, 2008, 10). However, the Tribunal rarely concerned itself with witness statements from the victims of Nazi atrocities. Instead it wanted to leave to history clear evidence of the Nazi regime’s crimes at the macro rather than the micro level. Indeed, modern historians have argued that the Holocaust survivors in Nuremberg were like Banquo’s Ghost – an unseen presence at the table.

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Contrary to the belief of many hopeful visitors to archives, most people who lived before the 20th century do not feature in the archival record. In Britain before 1914, as the historian A. J. P. Taylor said, ‘a sensible, lawabiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked’ (Taylor, 1965, 1). Until World War I, records in the Western world were largely created for or about the very rich or the very poor. The aristocracy and gentry bought and sold property. They made marriage settlements, disposed of property to children, ran estates and great houses, bought provisions and millinery, and employed labourers and servants. All of these activities created records. They became military officers, clergymen and office holders at home and abroad. And it is very likely some of their papers were kept by their solicitors and lawyers, the families themselves or within court records. At the other end of the social scale, there are considerable records for the poor who relied in some way on support from the parish, local government, or charity. The documents record how and why individuals and families received assistance and perhaps what happened to them. However, most people were too poor to pay tax and unless they enlisted in the army or found themselves in court or the workhouse they had few if any dealings with the state. For the most part, the church and later the state only recorded their births, marriages and deaths and, if they had slightly more money, registered their wills. From 1841, almost everyone in Britain began to appear in the decennial censuses. But for the majority of mankind in earlier times the archives are more or less silent. The lives of particular groups within society are even more wrapped in silences. Women, in particular, are significantly less likely to appear in records surviving from the past. Married women in England and Wales did not own property or make wills until the 1880s because a bride’s property passed to her husband on marriage and so they are largely absent from property records. As it was difficult to recover debts from wives, shopkeepers preferred to deal with their husbands rather than with the women themselves. There are records of the business dealings of some unmarried women and of widows, particularly those who continued to run their husband’s businesses. Some women made significant contributions in wartime, but their role is largely unrecorded. Many Royal Navy ships in the early 19th century carried small numbers of the wives of the crew to

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do the washing and carry out elementary nursing in battle. Very little is known about them because they are almost never mentioned in official records. Just one woman – Jane Townshend – appears on The National Archives Trafalgar Database, which lists all the men who served in Royal Navy ships at the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805. In her application for a Naval General Service Medal in 1847 (which was rejected), she claimed to have performed ‘useful services’ on HMS Defiance, presumably nursing the wounded (Lavery, 2010, 219). In other cases we can only learn of the existence of such women from casual glimpses in memoirs and diaries. Although there have been residents from Africa, Asia and the Americas in Britain since at least Tudor times, their presence in the records until the 1950s is ghostly. Unlike in the USA, South Africa and other countries, British records rarely directly mention an individual’s race. Imtiaz Habib, Professor of English at Old Dominion University, Virginia, found that in Tudor England black people are: unseen in civic record, and hidden as references to them most frequently are in secretive parish archives, where they are further obfuscated by a) the eccentricities of improvisatory parish documentation that is incomplete, inconsistent, and discontinuous, b) non-standard orthography, and the opacity of early modern English cultural name practices, and c) the pressure of the conversion process whereby ethnic identities disappear under Christian names. (Habib, 2008, 7)

Similarly, records relating to homosexuals are hard to find, except in police or court archives. Consequently, historians have had to adapt other strategies when researching their lives: While the law and its language has been the focus of historians, queer theorists and literary scholars have devoted themselves to disinterring the hidden meaning and evasions of Victorian literature. Queer theory in particular has encouraged practices of reading which seek to draw out the homosexual undercurrents in texts which, because of their historical location could not explicitly identify or name their desire. (Cocks, 2003, 2)

Because they are usually the product of bureaucracies, archives are also very poor at telling us about people’s everyday lives: what they ate, what they wore and what they did after dark are rarely recorded. Amanda Vickery

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commented that: ‘[House] interiors do not easily offer up their secrets. The backdrop of a life is rarely the fodder of diaries and letters, just as routines are less interesting to record than events. They were taken as read at the time, and so remain elusive in the written record today’ (Vickery, 2009, 3). Nor do records tell us much about emotions. Few contain the raw emotion of Isabella Newport’s statement before the London Commissary Court, which we met in Chapter 1. Their lack of emotionality arises from the very nature of their purpose. One of the major sources used by Amanda Vickery in her definitive study of the Georgian home was account-books, which – in upper-class families – were generally kept by the lady of the house. As Vickery commented: ‘they are often the only surviving documents of family fortune, charting economic vicissitudes, family tensions, triumphs and disasters’. However, as she observed, ‘They lack the emotional expansiveness of diaries and letters, and can give limited insight into attitudes’ (Vickery, 2009, 5).

Silence in other ways: cultural differences Researchers who use archives in more than one nation are often surprised by the great differences in the records kept by individual nations (and sometimes within constituent states or provinces). The contents of a simple document, such as a birth certificate, may vary greatly: in some countries, it may contain the barest information, while in others it may provide considerable data. The differences in record creation and keeping reflect differences in cultural and legal traditions. Sometimes, however, recording practices passed from one society to another. Even revolutionaries sometimes retained older forms of records creation. Pauline Maier, in her study of the American Declaration of Independence, notes that the rebellious colonists followed traditional and prescribed forms of documentation that were well established in England when they constructed their demand to King George III for freedom. They did so partly because they had carried that record-creating tradition with them to the New World, but also because they knew that their demand would only be taken seriously if it was written in an acceptable and recognizable form (Meier, 1997, 50–9). Cultural differences in record keeping can give the appearance of silences if users expect that records will be similar in different countries. Records

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of births, marriages and deaths are a good example of both the differences and the similarities. They are key to an individual’s identity and mark the most important events in his or her life: ‘the issue of a birth certificate furnishes individuals with foundational proof of legal identity and [is] the first step in tracking civil status throughout life’ (Caplan, 2005, 196). In Christian societies, the earliest records of baptisms, marriages and funerals were kept by parish priests or their clerks. In 1497, Cardinal Ximenes of Toledo ordered that parishes in his archdiocese keep proper records of baptisms to check the scandal of divorces disguised as decrees of nullity (Tate, 1983, 43). The Council of Trent in 1569 required all Catholic parishes across Europe to record baptisms and marriages. Records of burials had to be kept from 1644. Some countries, such as France, had begun keeping registers in the 1530s, although many Polish parishes did not start until the 1590s. In England and Wales, registers of baptisms, marriages and burials were first kept in 1538, as a result of an initiative by Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell had a different vision to Cardinal Ximenes, arguing that the records would be a useful means: ‘for the avoiding of sundry strifes, processes and contentions arising from age, lineal descent, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy, and for knowledge whether any person is our subject’ (Higgs, 2004a, 39). Everywhere, the earliest registers took the form of manuscript entries in blank books. English and Welsh entries were often terse because until 1812 (or 1753 in the case of marriages) there was little guidance about what should be recorded. For baptisms, registers normally only give the name of the child, its father and the date of the baptism, and there may be a note of whether the baby was illegitimate. In France, however, such registers usually give the infant’s and parents’ names, status of legitimacy, names of godparents, and the baptismal date (FamilySearch Wiki, n.d.). In Lutheran Denmark, they usually give the infant’s and parents’ names, status of legitimacy, names of witnesses and godparents (and often their residences), and the baptismal date (FamilySearch Wiki, n.d.). One of the lasting effects of the French Revolution was the introduction of civil registration of births, marriages and deaths in France in 1792, a change which was subsequently followed in other countries across Europe. In the Netherlands, for example, it was introduced in 1811. In France, this was an anti-clerical and truly revolutionary act as it abolished one of the key functions of the Church. It was also a symbol of the contract between

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the state and the citizen, that the state would impartially record the key events in its citizens’ lives. Perhaps it is no surprise that the Spanish introduction of civil registration in 1871 came during a time when there was a short-lived radical Republican government in the country. Although many German states had already had some form of civil registration, a similar system was introduced across the German Empire in 1876 (FamilySearch Wiki, n.d.). The introduction of civil registration in England and Wales began in July 1837. The reason was not a desire to diminish the role of the Church; according to George Graham, the Registrar General between 1842 and 1879, the driving force behind the new system was the need to create a centralized and reliable means of protecting the property rights of citizens. Edward Higgs has suggested that ‘the Victorians . . . were far more advanced in creating national systems of identification – but for the purposes of consolidating civil society rather than the nation state . . . the identification of citizens was to help individuals themselves as property holders, rather than to increase the power of the state’ (Higgs, 2004b, 82). Of course, each nation has records that are unique. English and Welsh records relating to the poor are extensive and reflect the fact that for over 400 years responsibility has lain with the state. Until the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47), welfare for the sick and needy was largely provided by monasteries and other religious institutions. The hospitals which acted like almshouses, for example, were run by members of religious orders. However, Henry VIII abolished the monasteries and most of the hospitals. Subsequently, care for the poor and needy became the responsibility of the state. The City of London took over the surviving London hospitals, and in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), a series of Acts was passed which gave responsibility for the care of the poor to the local civil administration. Each parish had to appoint two overseers of the poor who could raise local rates and spend the money on providing relief. This continued until the major reforms of 1834 when poor law unions, made up of a number of parishes, were established. The elected officials – the parochial overseers of the poor, and later the poor law guardians – had to balance the concerns of those who paid the rate against the needs of the elderly, infirm and orphaned. Detailed records were maintained as much to demonstrate to the ratepayers that their money was being spent appropriately as to record the support offered to the poor.

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The position was somewhat different in other parts of Europe, where poor relief continued to be directed by the Church, which ran orphanages, like the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice where Antonio Vivaldi was music master between 1727 and 1740, and beguinages – religious communities of elderly and single women – in many towns across the Low Countries and northern France. Even when the state was involved, it often acted through the agency of religious institutions, for example in using Belgian and French nuns to provide relief for refugees fleeing from the advancing Germans at the start of World War I in 1914. In the 19th century, even in tolerant Protestant Amsterdam, paupers were helped by a variety of organizations: ‘almost all religious denominations had one or more charitable institutions, each with its own regulations stipulating who could apply for which type of relief. Furthermore, the municipal government helped those poor who did not qualify for church assistance, provided they were Protestant’ (van Leeuwen, 1993, 320). There are numerous types of records in European countries that have no counterparts in the English-speaking world. For example, many countries have detailed records of families kept by the police or local authorities. In 1853, the First International Statistical Congress unanimously recommended the establishment of such population registers in every country: It is indispensable to establish in each commune a population register. Each household will occupy one page. The first inscriptions will be entered according to the information provided by the general census, and all mutations that will occur in the composition of households will be noted successively and in order. Administrative measures will provide for the assessment of changes in legal residence, in order that there may be an exact match between the persons crossed out and the new inscriptions. (Guttman and van de Walle, 1978, 121)

Since 1850, local authorities in the Netherlands have kept Population Registers (Archiefkaarten) for local residents; these registers include names, dates of birth, addresses, family relationships, occupations, religions, changes of address and dates of death. If anyone moved house, their new municipality would register them and a note would be added in the previous register indicating the municipality to which he or she had moved. The Netherlands was not alone; Belgium began keeping similar records

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in 1846, Italy in 1864 and 11 other European countries, including Germany, Finland and Italy, either keep or kept such registers. However, any attempt to keep similar records in Victorian England would probably have been howled down as being the first step towards a Continental police state. Indeed, the Nazis found such records useful when they occupied Western Europe in 1940, although in Amsterdam, and probably elsewhere, records for Jews were destroyed before the Gestapo arrived (Stadsarchief Amsterdam, n.d.). There are also records that reflect some aspect of the national psyche. In Britain, one set of potentially valuable records – those relating to taxation – have been lost because of concerns over privacy. Describing the reintroduction of income tax in the 1840s, Robert Colley noted that ‘the tax [was] a temporary imposition, the documentation created by the process was directed at a specific managerial function, that of collection of the tax for a definite period, after which, such records become obsolete and, therefore, disposable’. Once the tax had been collected the records were destroyed often with, to modern archival eyes, unseemly haste: ‘There was evidently a vast gulf in experience between administration then and administration now, between the Victorian mentality and way of dealing with things and that of the twentieth century’ (Colley, 2000, 78). As there was almost no direction about record keeping from the central Commissioners of Income Tax, local officials could dispose of records as they liked. However, the position was and remains completely different in Norway, where taxation was tied up with patriotic sentiment. A system of publishing details of everybody’s income tax payments started in 1814 after Norway established a central bank. To make sure that everyone was paying their fair share, assessments were published, which could be consulted at town halls. The records are still published on 20 October each year. They show the net earnings of the taxpayer and the amount paid in taxes. That such an initiative could be introduced was perhaps also due to a Lutheran belief that life should be conducted in the public eye. One major difference in records creation arises from the role played by notaries in countries which use civil law. In these countries, notaries are public officials who act on behalf of private individuals in non-contentious legal matters, including conveyancing, drawing up contracts and wills and estate planning. The notaries keep registers of the records they create and in some cases, keep copies of them. As a result, their archives are usually

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very voluminous. Countries which use common law, such as England and Wales and the USA, do not have this kind of record-keeping tradition, although records of solicitors or attorneys in these countries have some similarities.

The catalogue – hiding silences in plain view In the words of the UK-based archivist John Langdon, the production of catalogues is: ‘central to archival practice, cataloguing reflects the fundamental principles of the profession . . . It is the key area of expertise that defines an archivist and differentiates an archivist from other related professionals’ (Langdon, 2016, 37–8). The General International Archival Description standard stresses that: The purpose of archival description is to identify and explain the context and content of archival material in order to promote its accessibility. This is achieved by creating accurate and appropriate representations and by organizing them in accordance with predetermined models. . . . These processes make it possible to institute the intellectual controls necessary for reliable, authentic, meaningful and accessible descriptive records to be carried forward through time. (ISAD(G), 2000, 7)

However, catalogues can obscure as much as they can reveal and can lead to greater silences. At the most trivial level, poor cataloguing in the past can simply hide information. The older Oxford and Cambridge college archives, for example, have records going back 500 years or more. For the most part they are legal documents whose arrangement has suffered from well-meaning attempts by college fellows or college servants to catalogue them. In the 1930s, a fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, Noel DenholmYoung, took charge of the College archives: He seems to have enjoyed browsing through the uncatalogued archives, picking out documents which appeared interesting. He numbered up these documents in one sequence of running numbers which were assigned as he found them, with no thought of their provenance or original order. The result was calamitous. All the documents thus extracted have been deprived of their provenance, their original context is completely lost, and there is no sense of any hierarchical

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structure. It is good to have any unknown documents listed; but it is unfortunate that they were valued excessively for their individual worth. (Darwall-Smith and Riordan, 2009, 109)

Traditionally, record series are arranged by provenance, ensuring that records which have the same origin are kept together and records of different origins are not intermixed, and re-establishing the order of records imposed by their creator if it has been disturbed. According to Geoffrey Yeo, the principle of provenance ‘requires records to be managed in ways that secure and preserve knowledge of their origins and contexts. . . . Its methodological interpretation varies, and the purity of its implementation has sometimes been questioned, but its theoretical validity has been almost universally accepted’ (Yeo, 2017, 164). Despite the widespread acceptance of this approach and the structure of international descriptive standards which have been built on it, it is at least arguable that it has not been subject to rigorous user testing and a few voices have been raised against it. Writing in the 1930s, the Swedish archivist Carl Gustaf Weibull thought that arranging records by subject might be preferable because few original arrangements reflected ‘a well-thought-out system’ (Schellenberg, 1956, 188– 9). Nicholas Rodger, the distinguished naval historian, started his career at the UK Public Record Office and was closely attuned to the needs of users. He said: What . . . readers wanted was subject indexes which the PRO [Public Record Office] regarded with distaste, even with horror. Such indexes would not only be costly and demanding to produce in themselves, they would establish a very dangerous precedent. They would imply that the Office had a duty to provide something the public wanted, instead of the public having a duty to shift for itself and leave the archivists in peace. . . . Subject indexes were the broad and easy way down which the frivolous and light-minded were lured into picking up a few disconnected facts without any fundamental comprehension of the past. (Rodger, 2007, 105)

Probably more serious in the long term are cases where the catalogue fails to meet user needs because of the inherent biases in the way in which it was compiled. Yeo refers to numerous critics who have argued that ‘descriptions merely impose our own cultural perceptions onto phenomena

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that can never be described objectively, . . . that descriptions inevitably reflect the worldview of the describer, or that they reveal as much about the minds of archivists as about the records themselves’ (Yeo, 2017, 173). Because cataloguing has to be selective, perhaps précising the contents of a 200- or 300-page file in a couple of dozen words, cataloguers must decide what to include, what to emphasize, and what to ignore (Nesmith, 2002, 36). However, final or definitive descriptions are never possible. As Yeo (2017, 177) says: ‘Descriptions are, or should be, “always beta,” always responsive to new understandings and further development’. Because catalogues are, inevitably, the product of a particular group of archivists with a particular frame of reference, there is a risk that it might be hard if not impossible for researchers with another frame of reference to recognize material which might be of value to them. In effect, the descriptions will have silenced the archive. It is easy for cataloguers to make unwarranted assumptions about the level of knowledge of users. If records from World War II, for example, are described using codewords employed by the military (‘Tube Alloys’ instead of atomic weapons, or ‘Operation OVERLORD’ to refer to the landings in Normandy in 1944), catalogues can be a barrier to people unfamiliar with the terminology. In her reflection on Canadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, the scholar of Caribbean literature, Erica L. Johnson (2014, 159–60) discusses geographer Daniel Turnbull’s notion that ‘we need a cognitive schema’. For Brand, the cognitive schema for history lay in the archive. However, in terms of the history of slavery, it can be argued that the websites of The National Archives of the UK and the French Colonial Archives at Aix-en-Provence are encoded in a schema of captivity. In these instances, the archive fails to be a resource for those wishing to study the history of resistance and rebellion because, in the website descriptions of its holdings, the only allusions to resistance are references to runaway slaves or revolts. An extreme example of this emphasis on the voice of the captors is a complaint by proprietors in Tobago about the losses they were suffering because of attacks by pirates and runaway slaves; the archive fails to acknowledge or describe resistance by the enslaved (The National Archives, 1). The ethics of cataloguing are increasingly being questioned. In particular, there is concern about deliberately or inadvertently perpetuating the value systems of those rich and powerful individuals who created the records or the archival institutions which hold them. Val Johnson describes how a

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pilot project examining potential resources for the study of the history of black and Asian people at The National Archives of the UK ‘found that the catalogues had privileged the names of colonial officials, while failing to include the names of local peoples. . . . . More widely, derogatory terms such as “coolie” had been used’ (Johnson, 2007, 132–3). In the late 2000s and early 2010s, The National Archives attempted to address this, in part at least, by extensively recataloguing the Colonial Office correspondence with the West Indian colonies. One unintended consequence was that the exercise showed how poor the indexing of the equivalent correspondence with other colonies was, as well as a certain unawareness of colonial history, because racist treatment of native peoples was endemic across the British Empire. As well as issues with descriptions, users can be misled when they are given insufficient information about the basis on which selection was carried out before the records were made available. Yeo (2017, 174) noted that many commentators now believe that ‘Archivists should . . . acknowledge their own mediating role and provide information about appraisals in which they participated, appraisal criteria they applied, and assumptions they made in processing and describing records, as well as details of records they decided not to keep’. Writing in 1982, Tom Nesmith stressed that if we are to be able to understand the creation, provenance and evidential value of the records (Nesmith, 1982, 10–11) it is essential to describe the appraisal decisions which were taken before they arrived in the archive. In many cases, cataloguers do not explain why some records have survived and some apparently have not, thus leaving the user blinded. One of the major series of records at The National Archives of the UK is FO 371, Foreign Office, Political Departments, General Correspondence, 1906 to 1966. Its catalogue includes a note that ‘These registers and indexes often provide references to records destroyed prior to their transfer to The National Archives’. It would be of considerable interest to know how this destruction came about – was it accidental or the result of careful selection and, if so, what were the criteria used to select the records? Similarly, one of the authors of this book wanted to trace the record of an admission to Rauceby Hospital in Lincolnshire. Although the archives of the hospital are well listed on the Lincstothepast website,1 no information is given as to how (or if) the records were selected, or whether there is more material elsewhere. A brief note on the UK Hospital Records Database2 states that

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a large quantity of uncatalogued material arrived in 1996, but does not indicate whether it has all now been catalogued. Yeo (2017, 174) suggests that one solution may lie in recognizing that archival holdings are not pristine, but may have undergone many vicissitudes. He argues that descriptions should give credit not just to original creators but to collectors, custodians, and others who have intervened in shaping collections over time (Yeo 2009), and points out that Tom Nesmith (2011) recommended overlaying descriptions with reports on topics such as the contexts that shape records creation and the evolution of records through the various record-keeping processes. An increasing number of English archives now provide at least some of this information either on their own websites or through collaborative sites such as AIM25 (www.aim25.ac.uk). There has been debate about how far archival institutions should involve users in the description process. Receiving some form of feedback can be useful to cataloguers and the institutions in which they work. But could this be more widely expanded to include, where possible, information on the experiences of those about whom the records were compiled? As Yeo (2017, 175) remarks, Jeannette Bastian (2006) and others have affirmed that the people mentioned in records – those whose lives were affected by the activities the records represent – should be seen as more than mere subject content; their lives also form part of the record’s context, so that content and context meet. The value of archival collections to the user can be considerably enhanced by the inclusion of oral history testament or, where appropriate, reference to witness seminars such as those organized by the Institute of Contemporary British History. In recent years, many archivists have advocated engaging users, or individuals affected by records, in providing archival descriptions. Yeo (2017, 175) suggests that: ‘Inviting users to contribute to description has become increasingly popular, because it aligns not only with social justice and inclusivity agendas but also with current developments in technology’. Many archival institutions and libraries now encourage users to add tags, comments or more detailed information and to participate more widely in archival enterprise (Yakel, 2011). The Trove website maintained by the National Library of Australia, for example, has published transcripts of newspapers created using optical character recognition technology, and encourages users to edit and improve the results (http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper). The Discovery

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catalogue of The National Archives of the UK allows users to contact editorial departments if they find a description that they believe is misleading or wrong. It also offers a facility for users to tag records, although the fact that the vast majority of the tags that have been supplied are names of researchers’ ancestors suggests that this feature is perhaps not well understood. Some writers have argued that users should not only be empowered to participate, but should also ‘decide . . . the forms and frameworks of participation’ (Huvila, 2008, 30). This has not been accepted by all archivists, some of whom argue that users’ contributions should be curated to ensure that they meet agreed standards (Grannum, 2011, 119–23). But allowing amendments to descriptions by users can counterbalance finding aids that seem to privilege the value systems of the powerful, by enabling minority groups to supply alternative narratives and additional points of view (Yeo, 2017, 176–7). Where material has been fully recatalogued, whole new fields of research can be opened up. Over the last decade or so, The National Archives (TNA) of the UK has devoted considerable resources to recataloguing its holdings. In 2013/14 alone, 1.2 million descriptions on TNA’s Discovery catalogue were improved: about one in ten of the total number of descriptions (The National Archives, 2014, 7). Often the changes made have been minor but occasionally an indexing project has opened up a collection, which because of poor descriptions, had previously been almost mute. Series MH 47, for example, contains the surviving case papers from the Middlesex Appeal Tribunal, which during World War I heard appeals for exemption from conscription into the army. The original catalogue entries for the series were opaque at best, so this material had rarely been used. A major indexing project completed in January 2014 digitized 11,000 case papers. The records show the day-to-day challenges faced by individuals, families, households and businesses. But revealingly, and rather unexpectedly, they also show how wide support for the war was. Only 5% of cases concerned conscientious objectors. The vast majority of appellants wanted more time to put their affairs in order before joining up or argued that they were already doing work of national importance. Another barrier can be access to the catalogue itself. With the arrival of online catalogues, users now have, in theory, instant remote access to hundreds of thousands of descriptions that were previously hard to locate.

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But many users find catalogues difficult to use. In looking at how users interacted with online catalogues, Joyce Celeste Chapman (2010) found that users could easily become lost and that subject headings could be confusing and distracting. Others were unsure whether material mentioned in an online catalogue was itself available online, while the use of archival jargon proved consistently confusing. On the Lincs to the Past website (www.lincstothepast. com), for example, even though the language is largely jargon-free, inexperienced users are likely to be unsure about how to find a particular record because there is no clear description of how the records are arranged. In the experience of the author, having worked with groups of potential and actual users of archives, the difficulty of using online finding aids is perhaps the greatest silence that researchers now meet. If they cannot find what they want, how do they know whether it exists? This lack of confidence is especially common among the elderly, the less educated and those from ethnic minorities. As we will see in the next chapter, insufficient attention has been paid to the design of user interfaces and this is making it difficult for users to find material – in effect archives are silencing themselves. Many catalogue systems seem to delight in being user-unfriendly (Chapman, 2010; Gerhold, 2013). As Yeo (2017, 177) notes, this mattered less when finding aids were normally consulted in reading rooms with archivists on hand to offer assistance to researchers, but becomes critical when descriptions are only available digitally. Archival institutions are uncertain about how best to put finding aids online. Some websites display them as scrollable PDF documents, which has the advantage of familiarity but is hardly the best use of search tools. Others assume that search engines should provide the main, or only, way in. This may be a reasonable approach as users naturally ‘expect to be able to find archives . . . using the same techniques they use to find other things’ (Schaffner, 2009, 4). However, such tools may be more suited to a welldefined query, such as a search for records relating to the sinking of the Titanic, than to what Mitchell Whitelaw (2012, 124) calls the ‘complex, openended tasks’ that often characterize more speculative research, such as seeking material about grief. Equally importantly, as Yeo (2017, 178) points out: ‘How can contextual information be provided when users are presented with sets of search results listing items from different provenances, or fragments from different finding aids?’ There is clearly a risk that, when

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users are presented with a set of such results, they will simply be unable to assess what it is they are looking at. Dorian Gerhold draws attention to concerns about the difficulties of ascertaining whether online search results are comprehensive and understanding what they represent: ‘archivists have become ever more concerned to separate information about documents into hierarchical categories, scattering it across the collection, title and description fields, just at a time when online searching needs to be able to access all the information about an item at once’. Even so, for all their faults, he rightly concludes that: ‘online catalogues are enormously helpful. Even the least satisfactory provide something which was not available before’ (Gerhold, 2013, 57, 63). With all their limitations they have succeeded in opening up archives to the ordinary user.

Conclusion This chapter has looked at some experiences of researchers and other users when they are faced with a Silence in the Archive. It has shown that there is a real likelihood that users may reasonably expect records, particularly records relating to their own families, to exist and to be clearly described and readily accessible. However, these expectations may prove false, because many people who lived before the 20th century had little connection to the state, and so simply did not feature in the records, and because many aspects of life – notably the domestic and the personal – were never recorded. Moreover, users may struggle to understand the cultural differences and hence the differences in record-keeping traditions which exist between different countries. Finally, silences may arise from the catalogues which are provided and from the ways in which they are accessed in the digital age. The answer to these silences may lie partly in managing user expectations by providing clear explanations as to how and why archival collections have been created and what a researcher might realistically expect to find in them. In addition, help and guidance needs to be provided to assist researchers in using catalogues effectively. Above all, archival institutions need to ensure that the user is placed at the heart of the services they provide.

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Notes 1 LincstoPast website, www.lincstothepast.com. 2 UK Hospital Records Database, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/hospitalrecords.

References Bastian, J. A. (2003) Owning Memory: how a Caribbean community lost its archives and found its history, Libraries Unlimited. Bastian, J. A. (2006) Reading Colonial Records Through an Archival Lens: the provenance of place, space and creation, Archival Science, 6, 267–84. Breakell, S. (2011) Encounters with the Self: archives and research. In Hill, J. (ed.), The Future of Archives and Record Keeping: a reader, Facet Publishing, 23–36. Brown, R. Allen (1960) The Public Records and the Historian, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 2, 1–8. Caplan, J. (2005) Write Me Down, Make Me Real, History Workshop, 60, 195–201. Chapman, J. C. ( 2010) Observing Users: an empirical analysis of user interaction with online finding aids, Journal of Archival Organization, 8 (1), 4–30. Cocks, H.G. (2003) Nameless offences: homosexual desire in the nineteenth century, I. B. Tauris. Colley, R. (2000) Destroy’d by Time’s Devouring Hand? Mid-Victorian income tax records: a question of survival, Archives, 25, 102–15. Craven, L. (2008) From the Archivist’s Cardigan to the Very Dead Sheep: What are archives? What are archivists? What do they do?. In Craven, L. (ed.), What are Archives?, Ashgate, 7–30. Darwall-Smith, R. and Riordan M. (2009), Archives for Administration or Archives for Antiquarians? A history of archive cataloguing in four Oxford colleges, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 30 (1), 93–115. Eichhorn, K. (2008) Archival Genres: gathering texts and reading spaces, InVisible Culture: an electronic journal for visible culture, 12, http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/archival-genres-gathering-texts-and-reading-spaces. Etherton, J. (2006) The Role of the Archivist in the Perception of Self, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 27 (2), 227–46. FamilySearch Wiki (n.d.) https://familysearch.org/wiki/en. Gerhold, D. (2013) Record Office Online Catalogues, The Local Historian, 43, 57–63.

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Grannum, G. (2011) Harnessing User Knowledge: The National Archives, Your Archives wiki. In Theimer, K. (ed.), A Different Kind of Web, Society of American Archivists, 116–27. Guttman, M. P. and van de Walle, E. (1978) New Sources for Social and Demographic History: the Belgian population registers, Social Science History, 2 (2), 121–43. Habib, I. (2008) Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: imprints of the invisible, Ashgate. Higgs, E. (2004a) The Information State, Palgrave Macmillan. Higgs E. (2004b) Life, Death and Statistics; Civil Registration, Censuses and the work of the General Register Office, 1837-1952, Hatfield, Local Population Studies. Huvila, I. (2008) Participatory Archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management, Archival Science, 8, 15–36. ISAD (G) (2000) General International Archival Description: adopted by the Committee on Descriptive Standards, Stockholm, Sweden 19–22 September 1999, 2nd edn, International Council on Archives, www.icacds.org.uk/eng/ISAD(G).pdf. Johnson, E. L. (2014) Building the Neo-Archive: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, Meridians, 12 (1), 149–71. Johnson, V. (2007) Creating History? Confronting the myth of objectivity in the archive, Archives, 32, 117. Ketelaar, E. (2008) Archives as Spaces of Memory, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 29 (1), 9–27. Langdon, J. (2016) Describing the Digital: the archival cataloguing of born digital personal papers, Archives and Records, 37 (1), 37–52. Lavery, B. (2010) Royal Tar, Conway. Meier, P. (1997) Making the American Declaration of Independence, Vintage Books. Myerson, J., Galloway, P. and Bias, R. (2012) Improving the User Experience of Professional Researchers: applying a user-centered design in archival repositories, Assist, 49, 1–7. Nesmith, T. (1982) Archives from the Bottom Up: social history and archival scholarship, Archivaria, 14, 5–26. Nesmith, T. (2002) Seeing Archives: postmodernism and the changing intellectual place of archives, The American Archivist, 65, 1, 24–41. Nesmith, T. (2011) Documenting Appraisal as a Societal-archival Process: theory, practice, and ethics in the wake of Helen Willa Samuels. In Cook, T. (ed.),

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Controlling the past: documenting society and institutions, Society of American Archivists, 31–50. Parsons, J. E. R. (n.d.) Papers, Imperial War Museum Documents 18760. Rodger, N. A. M. (2007) Drowning in a Sea of paper: British archives of naval warfare, Archives, 32, 107–21. Samuel, R. (1972) Headington Quarry: recording a labouring community, Oral History, 4, 107–22. Schaffner, J. (2009) The Metadata is the Interface: better description for better discovery of archives and special collections, synthesized from user studies, www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-06.pdf. Schellenberg, T. R. (1956) Modern Archives: principles and techniques, F. W. Cheshire. Simon, B. (2001) Facts and Fictions in the Archives, Rethinking History, 5 (3), 427–535. Stadsarchief Amsterdam (n.d.) https://web.archive.org/web/20140616122508/http://stadsarchief.amsterdam.n l/english/archives_database/genealogy/archiefkaarten/manual. Tate, W. E. (1983) The Parish Chest, Phillimore. Taylor, A. J. P. (1965) English History 1914–1945, Clarendon. The National Archives 1, T1/546/106–107. The National Archives (2014) The National Archives Annual Report 2013–14, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/annual-report-13-14.pdf. van Leeuwen, M. H. D. (1993) Surviving with a Little Help: the importance of charity to the poor of Amsterdam 1800–50, in a comparative perspective, Social History, 18 (3), 319–38. Vickery, A. (2009) Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England, Yale University Press. Whitelaw, M. (2012) Towards Generous Interfaces for Archival Collections, Comma, 2012 (2), 123–32. Yakel, E. (2011) Who Represents the Past? Archives, records, and the social web. In Cook, T. (ed.), Controlling the Past: documenting society and institutions, Society of American Archivists, 257–78. Yeo, G. (2009) Custodial History, Provenance, and the Description of Personal Records, Libraries and the Cultural Record, 44, 50–64. Yeo, G. (2017) Continuing Debates about Description. In Eastwood, T. and McNeil, H. (eds), Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd edn, Libraries Unlimited, 163–92.

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CHAPTER 3 The digital David Thomas

Introduction In 2005, Professor John Vincent wrote ‘we may be on the verge of a new pre-history, with the era of serious intricate, intimate knowledge of the past merely a fortuitous interlude. Electronic communication means no history’ (Vincent, 2005, 19). Although Vincent’s views were not accepted by all historians, they are worth bearing in mind. This chapter will discuss the possibility of silences in the archive in the digital age. The move to the use of the digital in creating records has been a paradoxical process as far as managing records is concerned and these paradoxes will be explored in this chapter. The first paradox is that, in the digital world, laws designed to create greater openness have led to increased destruction of records. The second paradox is that more records might mean less information and less knowledge. The third paradox is that more records might mean that archives end up with smaller collections. Traditionally, archivists have been concerned about the potential loss of digital records because of technological obsolescence and the dangers to which records are exposed in the period between when they are created and when they are moved to the archive. More recently, there has been a huge growth in the scale of digital records, which makes normal archival processing, especially selection and review for sensitivity, difficult if not impossible. There seems to be a reluctance to involve users in the selection of digital records, because it has always been so. The large volume of

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material encourages some institutions to automatically destroy sensitive material in order to avoid the costs and difficulties of responding to Freedom of Information queries. This is understandable, as a simple enquiry could involve thousands of e-mails. Alternatively, government ministers and senior civil servants may simply not document their actions, or may use alternative, unofficial methods of communication, which may mean their files are outside the scope of the archive. It seems clear that procedures for managing records have not kept pace with changes in technology, particularly where responsibility has moved from traditional records managers to IT professionals. There are very specific problems with some of the newer types of record – e-mails, the internet and digitized material. Because of the huge volume of material, it is very difficult to identify or even to understand individual items using conventional search tools and new and more powerful systems are needed to make sense of digital archives. Even if digital records survive and can be found and read, there remain possible issues about their authenticity – are there effective tests of authenticity in the digital realm? Increasingly, information is being stored outside conventional systems, whether in social media sites or in the cloud, and this, in turn, makes it harder to archive and much data may have already vanished. Steps are being taken to develop standards and approaches to ensure the long-term future of digital information and it has proved possible to capture some records under extreme circumstances, but in the longer term a new and more radical approach to the digital is essential, but this requirement is not widely recognized.

Digital preservation Five or six years ago, this chapter would have focused on the preservation of digital records – would the growing threat of their becoming obsolescent and unreadable mean that the first years of the 21st century would become a sort of digital dark age, with most government records having migrated to the digital, while archives and libraries were unable to ensure their survival? This is probably no longer the received truth, but there are other, more nuanced threats which might mean that this period is one in which the continuing availability of the archive is under increased risk. Will we

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lose all of it? No. Might we find that a significant amount of material is not available? Very probably. The story begins in 1995 when Jeff Rothenberg (1995) published an article in Scientific American in which he told the story of how in the year 2045, his (as yet unborn) grandchildren were exploring the attic of his house when they found a letter dated 1995 and a CD-ROM. The letter said the CD-ROM contained a document which provided the key to obtaining his (as yet unearned) fortune. Sadly, the grandchildren had never seen a CDROM, except in movies and, even if they could find a suitable disk drive, how would they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk and read his obsolete digital document? Rothenberg drew attention to a range of possible technological failures which could render digital documents unreadable in the future. Every aspect of an IT system has the potential to become obsolete, meaning that documents would become unreadable – computers might become unsupportable and break, operating systems might no longer be capable of being run on more modern devices, software might be unsupported and unusable and even if none of the above happened, the storage media (tape or disks) might fail. Rothenberg has a fortunate ability to produce soundbites – his report to the Council on Library and Information Resources was called Avoiding Technological Quicksand (Rothenberg, 1999). By 2006 his concerns had become widely known. In that year, the magazine Popular Mechanics published an article, quoting from him, entitled ‘The Digital Ice Age’. Losing records was not the only thing readers of the magazine had to worry about that year – the headline article in the issue which contained Rothenberg’s piece concerned a killer asteroid which is coming our way. Because of his advocacy, there has been a huge effort to ensure the long-term survival of digital records. While Rothenberg’s analysis of the problem – that there is a future risk of catastrophic loss of digital records – has broadly been accepted, there have been severe criticisms of his solutions to the problem, which involve building systems which will emulate the way in which older IT systems ran, thus enabling old software to be run on current machines. Part of the criticism of Rothenberg’s approach centres round that fact that he was writing in the pre-internet era and that there is little evidence that file format obsolescence is a current problem. Moreover, it is argued that his approach is very expensive – developing emulation systems adds greatly to the cost of preserving digital records (Rosenthal, 2013).

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Tim Gollins, who is Head of Digital Archiving at the National Records of Scotland, has argued (Gollins, 2009) that while the threat of technological obsolescence is real in some particular cases, the major threat to the survival of digital records does not come from media, hardware or software obsolescence. In the case of software he quotes the example of the Unix operating system, which is now 30 years old and is capable of handling disks 1,000,000 times bigger than when first created, and executed by new software at least four times bigger (but faster and more reliable) than the original. Nevertheless, it is still capable of reading every single disk ever written in that 30 years. Gollins argued that a much more imminent threat is poor capture and the inability to achieve safe and secure storage of the original material. Like Rothenberg, Gollins is very good at soundbites and talks of the need for Parsimonious Preservation – the development of affordable systems designed to meet current preservation needs. Some people are still issuing stark warnings of the dangers of a digital dark age – in October 2015 (Knapton, 2015) Professor David Garner, former President of the Royal Society for Chemistry, warned of the dangers of digital storage and urged that important material be printed out on paper. Curiously, the example of potential loss he cited was the BBC Domesday Project, whose disks, dating from 1986, can no longer be read and the data had to be recreated using special software developed at Leeds University – a trope which is mentioned by almost everyone trying to scare us about digital records. So far, neither of the predictions of doom in the December 2006 issue of Popular Mechanics have yet come true. We have not lost all our digital records, nor, at the time of writing have we been struck by a killer asteroid or for that matter a nuclear war. What such scaremongering overlooks is the huge loss of records in the physical world. Where are all the records that tell us how the Roman Empire was administered; all we have is glimpses (and see Chapters 1 and 2)?

New dangers If file format obsolescence is not currently a terrible threat to the survival (and hence availability) of records, then presumably, everything is okay with the digital. Well, no. There are other pressures which are increasingly putting digital records at risk.

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Digital continuity It has increasingly become apparent that digital records are greatly at risk in the period between their creation and their transfer to the archives because unlike paper, which will survive for decades untouched, digital material needs active steps to be taken to ensure its survival. This view, which is normally referred to as ‘digital continuity’, argues that there are three major risk points for digital records: at times of business or organizational change, at times of technological change, or at times of information asset or management change. If a business goes through a transition, for example a major restructuring, or needs to respond to new opportunities and challenges, the way it needs to use information may also change. There may be continuity issues if the information assets, information management and IT systems do not support the new way the business needs to work. Staff changes, including redundancy programmes, can result in a loss of vital understanding of context or expertise in operating technology. Managers may focus on the new and fail to take appropriate steps to secure the records produced on the old systems. Changes to the IT environment can impact on digital continuity. For example, during the transfer of records to new formats or systems, it is possible that the essential metadata, context and audit data might be lost while the move to new systems might mean that old data with no current value can easily be neglected or lost. The danger is that, if the way in which you structure your information and file stores changes, or metadata policies and processes are revised, it may not be possible to find information when it is needed or to understand and interpret it correctly (The National Archives, 2011). The National Archives in the UK developed a set of guidance and advice to ensure the survival of digital records between the time they were created and when they are moved to the archive. Similar digital continuity plans have been developed by Archives New Zealand and the National Archives of Australia. In New Zealand, the Digital Continuity Action Plan (Archives New Zealand, n.d.) fed into a joint preservation strategy owned by both the Archives and the National Library. In Australia, the Digital Continuity 2020 Policy (National Archives of Australia, 2015) is a whole-of-government approach to digital information governance. It complements the Australian Government’s digital transformation agenda and underpins the digital economy. The policy aims to support efficiency, innovation, interoperability, information reuse and accountability by

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integrating robust digital information management into all government business processes. While such moves are expressions of good intentions, there appears to have been no easily accessible evaluation of their impact. There have been some less satisfactory developments. Alice Prael and Amy Wickner explained that Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland Libraries have accepted born-digital content from donors for the past ten years and these donations have grown exponentially over the last few years. Born-digital acquisitions will continue to grow as modern record keeping moves to exclusively digital formats. Despite the volume of records acquired, almost none of it had been processed into the Libraries’ digital collections for long-term preservation and access. Hard drives and other digital storage media have instead been processed like paper material and placed in boxes, often with printed copies of file inventories or of the digital contents. It is only in the past year or so that progress has been made in allowing this material to be ingested into a preservation system (Prael and Wickner, 2015).

Users One serious threat is that there appears to have been little involvement of users in the process of selecting digital records for permanent preservation in archives and consequently the material selected may not meet their needs. There seems to be some doubt about the identity of users of digital records. Users feature little in the literature on digital records. Clifford Lynch wrote: I’m starting to believe that collections – at least many collections based around cultural heritage materials – don’t really have natural communities around them. In fact, one of the things that we learned over and over again and I think this has been born [sic] out a hundred times in other settings, is that digital materials find their own unexpected user communities. That when you put materials out there, people you would never have expected find these materials from sometimes very strange and exotic places that you wouldn’t have imagined, and sometimes make extraordinarily creative or unpredicted uses of that material. So perhaps we should avoid over-emphasizing pre-conceived notions about user communities when creating digital collection, at least in part because we are so bad at identifying or predicting these target communities. (Lynch, 2002)

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Since Lynch wrote, however, the way in which users seek and digest information has changed rapidly. In 2014, mobile devices became the most common way to access information on the internet and, to quote David Nicholas (2014, 2), ‘Searching and reading now takes place in the social space and often on the hoof, in Starbucks or the pub, rather than the university library’. And reading is now very quick, a typical mobile visit to the Europeana digital cultural site is just over a minute (Nicholas, 2014, 5). Ian Chowcat (2015) recently conducted a review of how technology is affecting libraries. Things have moved so quickly with the growth of the use of mobile devices and the development of search tools such as Google Scholar that some radical thinkers are advocating that libraries should move away from the provision of discovery services towards providing more content online. Chowcat (2015, 18–20) looked at current issues for users of online resources. He found that they expect to be able to access resources anywhere from any device. He also reported on research into the generation which will be entering universities from 2020 to 2025. He found that they see online and offline experiences as seamlessly blended and ‘they learn very young how to leap over technological hurdles reaching the content they want’. The key word here is content; the future generation wants to access material, not catalogues. The move to the digital has fundamentally changed the way in which archives facilitate access to records. New problems and new silences have emerged with the development of online catalogues because for these to be usable, they do not just rely on archival cataloguing standards but also on good interface design. Joyce Celeste Chapman from North Carolina State University Libraries (Chapman, 2010), made the important point that the goals of descriptive standards do not include display and that user needs rather than the structure of the EAD XML standard should dictate how finding aids are displayed. The interfaces to the catalogues need to be carefully designed to allow users to easily identify the material they wish to see. There is a world of difference between the user consulting a catalogue in an archive reading room where help is at hand and one consulting the same catalogue remotely, or even stumbling on a reference to an archival document as a result of a Google search. As Geoffrey Yeo (2017) said, ‘It is arguable that presentation may have mattered less when finding aids were almost always consulted in reading rooms with archivists on hand to offer assistance, but becomes critical when descriptions are rendered digitally for

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remote use. In the absence of agreed standards, users consulting a variety of online resources often have to learn a new interface and retrieval syntax for each Web site they visit.’ The problem is that archivists not only have to learn new skills and techniques concerned with interface design, but they also need to negotiate their perception of user requirements with web designers and other IT professionals who have their own methodologies and approaches. There is currently some evidence that insufficient attention has been paid to the design of user interfaces and that this is making it difficult for users to find material – in effect, archives are silencing themselves. A literature review by Morgan G. Daniels and Elizabeth Yakel of the University of Michigan (Daniels and Yakel, 2010) found that users were confused by archival terminology and practice and that this confusion leads to problems navigating through online finding aids. In particular, they found that understanding where results were likely to be found required some knowledge of the structure of a finding aid. In one test they conducted, they asked searchers to determine which repository whose collections were in the Online Archive of New Mexico held the most collections on the subject of slavery. Just over two-thirds of the participants got the correct answer, but it became clear that many participants did not understand the fundamental relationships that finding aids are representative of collections, a number of which are held by a given repository. There is also the problem that in-house search tools which come bundled with off-the-shelf catalogue systems may not be as powerful as Google. Speaking of library interfaces, Ian Chowcat (2015, 12) said: ‘Furthermore, while the “single search box” approach of discovery layer services seeks to mimic the Google approach, what it misses is the highly developed and complex personalisation and range of services that underpin the apparent simplicity of Google’. Increasingly, users rely on Google for information and many archive catalogues are now exposed to internet search engines. However, this may not be wholly satisfactory. In some cases, information cannot be found in archive catalogues, but needs to be discovered in secondary finding aids, including contemporary registers. Relying solely on Google would mean that users missed such potential sources of information. Closely allied to this is the problem which arises when users type a query into Google and are directed to a low-level description in an archival

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catalogue. As Morgan G. Daniels and Elizabeth Yakel wrote in The American Archivist (Daniels and Yakel, 2010, 535), some online users are ‘perhaps confused by finding themselves in the middle of a finding aid’. This is perhaps an understatement – lost in cyberspace may be more appropriate. Try searching for John Daymond, ‘the full moon killer’ who murdered James Percival in Durham, England in 1938. The second entry in the return by Google is a link to The National Archives catalogue entry for Daymond (ASSI 52/494). If you click on the link, it is not immediately clear that you are in the middle of an archive catalogue. The page has a header ‘The National Archives’ and a sub-header ‘Murder and Attempted Murder, Daymond: John’. There is a breadcrumb trail which says ‘Home>Discovery> ASSI 52/494’. If you click on this, you will find that you are, indeed, in the catalogue of The National Archives. The page tells the user the piece reference, the date, the fact that Daymond was accused of murder and attempted murder and that the record is held by The National Archives at Kew. It also states that the record is open but has not been digitized and cannot be downloaded. It contains the statement that ‘The naming of a defendant within this catalogue does not imply guilt’ – slightly alarming, since Daymond was hanged at Durham gaol in February 1939. There are links providing further context, but these are partially written in technical terminology. From a historic, archival point of view, the descriptions are correct and, for anyone accessing the information via The National Archives’ catalogue and especially at Kew, where expert advice is available, they are valuable, but what is a time-poor Google searcher seeking instant information to make of the statement that the records are in a series Records of Justices of Assize, Gaol Delivery, Oyer and Terminer, and Nisi Prius? Or of the claim that a substantial number of murders in this series are cases of infanticide? Daymond’s crime was notorious, partly because of his youth – he was 19 when he was hanged, partly because of his extreme violence: he attacked a father and son, both called James Percival, killing one and wounding the other – but also because of his claim that he was insane and that his insanity was caused by the full moon. As a result, there is documentation of the case in books and local newspapers. The risk is that, without interfaces to catalogues which are developed for the internet age and, more specifically, for the current and future generations of users who demand instant, easy access to resources, archives will effectively impose silences on themselves. Why puzzle over the meaning of Oyer and Terminer, when you can get the

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story of Daymond’s crimes by searching Google? This will take you to Steve Fielding’s book Hanged at Durham (2007), which will give you all the details online, including an extract from a local paper. Further information about the case can be found by searching the online texts of newspapers available in The Times Digital Archive, and the British Newspaper Archive; currently these can only be accessed from subscribing libraries or via a paywall, but the growth of online newspapers which by their nature provide direct access to information will present a further challenge to archives.

Volume Another danger arises from the fact that volumes of data have grown hugely over the recent period – one estimate is that the global number of records increased by 60% between 2013 and the end of 2015. The cost of data creation and storage has declined hugely. Businesses and governments have access to increasingly cheap in-house storage and to high-quality cloudbased solutions. It is widely believed that the cost of hard disk storage space is halved every 18 to 24 months (Mayer-Schönberger, 2011, 69). Because there is so much more data, the cost of reviewing it for its long-term value has increased and consequently, it may be cheaper to keep it all rather than select what is important (Mayer-Schönberger, 2011, 91). Much of the material which is stored consists of ephemera and of duplicates – copies of e-mails and other documents are automatically stored across portable devices, desktops, servers and back-up systems. An investigation by the data company Veritas Technologies (2016) revealed that corporate bodies store a vast amount of trivial or unidentified data. They found that, globally, 52% of data stored was unidentified, 33% was redundant, obsolete or trivial and only 15% was business-critical. The reasons for this high volume of valueless or unidentified data were that organizations determined their storage budgets on the basis of the amount of material which they had to store and not its value. Second, many organizations were moving data to the cloud, which offered free or lowcost storage. Third, employees were increasingly using corporate systems to store personal data; 57% of employees stored photographs and 47% stored music. Veritas argued that this uncontrolled data was very costly and consumed IT resources and the unidentified data posed a particular threat because it might contain non-compliant data, leading to a critical business

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risk. In an archive context, such huge volumes of data add greatly to the cost and complexity of reviewing material before it can be released.

Sensitivity The increasing scale of digital records is compounded by the absence of appropriate technology to identify sensitivities. Before discussing this, it is important to clarify terminologies. In the UK, government records can be security classified and also sensitive. Their security classification is determined by how significant they are in terms of national security as set out in UK Cabinet Office guidelines (Cabinet Office, 2014), while their sensitivity is determined by whether they are subject to exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act, 2000. Records which are security classified have to go through a two-stage process – a declassification review to ensure that they are no longer covered by a security classification and a sensitivity review to determine whether they are caught by a Freedom of Information Act exemption. In the USA, the term declassification covers both security and sensitivity review. A 2012 survey by the Association of Research Libraries reported that the biggest access and discovery challenge is the sensitivity of material – concerns about copyright, confidentiality, privacy, intellectual property and personally identifiable information (Association of Research Libraries, 2012). A report by Appel et al. (2015, 14) on born-digital access in archival repositories showed that many respondents to the survey spoke of the need for tools to generate automated metadata and to support processing with large born-digital collections, as well as a need for tools for redaction, privacy and due diligence for born-digital material. These are very real problems – the US Public Interest Declassification Board said in a recent report (2014, 3): ‘the government remains in need of advanced technological tools to assist analysis and decision-making in support of declassification review. Policy changes should support the adoption of these technologies, including advanced analytics and machine-learning.’ A slightly earlier report by the same body stated that: At one intelligence agency alone, it is estimated that approximately 1 petabyte of classified records accumulates every 18 months. One petabyte of information is equivalent to approximately 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with

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text, or about 13.3 years of High-Definition video. Under the current declassification model, it is estimated that one full-time employee can review 10 four-drawer filing cabinets of text records in one year. In the above example, it is estimated that one intelligence agency would, therefore, require two million employees to review manually its one petabyte of information each year. Similarly, other agencies would hypothetically require millions more employees just to conduct their reviews. (Public Interest Declassification Board, 2012, 17)

There are two possible consequences of the failure to develop and apply appropriate technologies to declassify large volumes of records. The first, as the Public Interest Declassification Board pointed out: The problem is growing. Agencies are currently creating petabytes of classified information annually, which quickly outpaces the amount of information the Government has declassified in total in the previous seventeen years since Executive Order 12958 established the policy of automatic declassification for 25year-old records. Without dramatic improvement in the declassification process, the rate at which classified records are being created will drive an exponential growth in the archival backlog of classified records awaiting declassification, and public access to the nation’s history will deteriorate further. (Public Interest Declassification Board, 2012, 3)

The second problem is more insidious and more likely in the British situation. Because Data Protection legislation imposes penalties for release of personal data, there is a very real risk that government departments will proactively close material which has not been reviewed to protect themselves against possible legal action. The consequence will be the same – a further deterioration in public access to the nation’s history.

Destruction of records The sheer volume of digital records is the origin for what can be referred to as the first paradox of digital openness. The paradox is that laws intended to promote greater access or to protect individual privacy have resulted in the mass destruction of digital records. Because processing Freedom of Information (FoI) enquiries covering large volumes of digital records is

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expensive and difficult, organizations seem increasingly to delete material before it can be subject to an access request. We can see this from the State of Minnesota, where cities are free to set their own retention periods for emails, but are required to keep those which are essential for showing government effectiveness, which contain contracts or are subject to a court case or which staff require for their work. The period for which e-mails are retained ranges from 60 days in Rochester to six months in St Paul. The motives of the cities for this rapid destruction include the need to reduce costs and to facilitate responses to FoI requests – retaining a large pool of e-mails would tie up staff time and resources in reviewing requested e-mails to redact non-public information (Moniz, 2015). The Minnesota cities have regulated policies that allow for the destruction of e-mails, but there is evidence from other places of a much less controlled approach. Elizabeth Denham (2015), then Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, produced a report on three cases where information had not been made available in response to FoI requests. One of the cases concerned the disappearance of Aboriginal women who had been hitchhiking on Highway 61, known as the Highway of Tears. In one case, an official admitted to deleting e-mails which would have met the terms of the request, while it emerged that almost all the emails sent by the Deputy Chief of Staff in the Office of the Premier during the course of her work had been deleted. Closely allied to this is the distressing tendency by many government ministers and others to claim that the proactive release of government data is in some way equivalent to the on-request release of specific government information. When questioned about plans to reform the Freedom of Information Act in 2015 (Mason and Watt, 2015), the British Prime Minister responded by saying that the government had opened up vast amounts of data and by doing this has created a lot of business. There is a clear difference between proactive release by governments of data and the discovery of closed information through direct FoI requests. It is doubtful whether a proactive release of data by the UK government would, for example, have revealed that British pilots had been involved in bombing Syria in apparent defiance of a UK Parliamentary vote to the contrary. This information, according to a newspaper report (Halliday, MacAskill and Perraudin, 2015) was discovered through an FoI request.

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Failure to document Probably more serious than deliberate destruction is the apparent tendency of some civil servants and elected ministers to not document decisionmaking processes, or to use informal technologies which are outside the scope of FoI. In 2002, the Swedish National Audit Office concluded that ‘the generous principle of public access to official records has led to a situation in which processes are not documented and decision-making processes are collected in informal personal networks that are completely inaccessible to the general public’. The most notorious example of this is the personal e-mail server which Hillary Clinton set up at her home in Chappaqua, New York shortly before she was sworn in as Secretary of State in 2009. She then relied on this server for all her electronic correspondence – both work-related and personal – during her four years in office. She did not use an official US government e-mail account which was provided for her. Mrs Clinton claimed that she had done this ‘for convenience’, but sceptics have argued that it gave her total control over her e-mails. It seems that Mrs Clinton was operating within the law which was in force at the time by doing this, but that she may possibly have violated laws relating to the handling of classified information (Zurcher, 2016). In the war in Iraq, it was reported that the Coalition Provisional Authority so distrusted the US State Department that Colin Powell encouraged staff working in Baghdad to communicate with colleagues in Washington using Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail accounts to avoid detection by either the Coalition Provisional Authority or the Pentagon. Inevitably this meant that no trace would find its way to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington (Moss, 2012, 865). This trend towards using non-official means of communication which fall outside the scope of the archives has continued. In 2015, the Australian Magazine Image and Data Manager (2015) revealed that the Prime Minister of Australia used a non-government e-mail server for government business. Similarly, in the UK, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, had a personal e-mail account called Mrs Blurt which was used to discuss government business with advisors (Vasagar, 2012). The move to the digital has changed the scope of what constitutes a record. The lines between public and private records have become blurred. For example, in 2015 the Prime Minister of New Zealand was subjected to an investigation following the revelation that he routinely deleted texts

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from his phone. The report by Chief Archivist Marilyn Little described Prime Minister John Key’s habit of deleting texts as ‘pragmatic’ and said texts in his capacity as a party leader, or private texts were not considered public records, even if sent on a ministerial phone (Trevett, 2015). It seems that the law has not kept up with changes in technology. In the case of Hillary Clinton, the controlling interpretation of the 1950 Federal Records Act was that officials using personal e-mail accounts must ensure that official correspondence was passed to the government. Ten months after she took office, a new regulation allowed the use of private e-mails only if federal records were ‘preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system’. Mrs Clinton was able to claim that she met these requirements because most of her official e-mails were sent to people with government e-mail accounts which would have been archived automatically.

Record keeping One problem which is apparent to anyone who has hands-on experience of managing records in the digital world is the split between ICT departments who manage the technology and records managers who manage the records. A World Bank working paper (Lemieux, 2015) identified a shift over the past 20 years from a situation in which the national archives in many countries had an active role in the management of records in government agencies to one in which the responsibility for the management of recorded communications falls more to ICT authorities. There are tensions between the two sides and the working paper claims that ICT officials exhibit little awareness of the priorities and concerns of managing records. I have seen the situation from both sides and can confirm that this issue exists in the UK government. Ensuring that appropriate metadata is provided for digital documents is essential if they are to be preserved and accessed. There are good standards for technical metadata which would allow the documents to be read; for example, systems can easily identify a file as a Microsoft Word document or a JPEG image. What is much harder is to create contextual and descriptive metadata which would allow the document to be used and understood. If we are lucky, the Word document might have a title, as might the image, but we also need to understand who created it and how it fitted into the overall information architecture of the creating institution.

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The rapid introduction of e-mails and other digital documents has changed the way in which metadata is created. As Michael Moss (2012, 866– 72) explained, in the paper world the clerk in the front office would describe the contents of a document in an endorsement and the registry clerk in the back office would allocate a place for it in the file plan. This complex process ensured that metadata was created about each document and it was possible to understand its context by understanding where it was filed in the organization’s file plan. In the world of electronic records, the creator has to carry out both functions, since the back office has been collapsed into the front office. Modern electronic document management systems require users to act as filing clerks, doing their own digital filing and adding their own metadata. Writing in the New York Times, Robert Pear described the problem: In the past, clerks put most important government records in central agency files. But record-keeping has become decentralized, and the government has fewer clerical employees. Federal employees say they store many official records on desktop computers, so the records are not managed in a consistent way. ‘The Achilles’ heel of record-keeping is people,’ said Jason R. Baron, the director of litigation at the US National Archives. ‘We used to have secretaries. Now each of us with a desktop computer is his or her own record-keeper. That creates some very difficult problems.’ (Pear, 2008)

Research at the University of Glasgow has shown that the creators of documents will only apply metadata to their own documents if it adds value to their work; as Michael Moss (2012, 867, 872) said, senior managers cannot be expected to act as filing clerks. Sir Alex Allan’s 2015 report on the management of the UK government’s digital records showed that many users found the requirement to file records into a departmental electronic records management system or corporate file plan was an unwanted burden because of the necessity of filling in a range of additional fields to provide the information to find the record and its content. Many found it easier to find and retrieve records which had been stored on a shared or personal drive (Allan, 2015).

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E-mails During the years of Tony Blair’s government, the British Cabinet Office moved away from producing minutes of meetings and came to rely on emails that people sent to each other after meetings as the only record. In 2003, the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly published a number of government e-mails concerning the Iraq war and the death of Dr Kelly. As Michael Moss observed, subject headings on e-mails were not always filled in and only the context provides any clue as to what they might conceivably be about (Moss, 2005, 580). In organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, it is hard to identify which e-mails are significant – even ones with good subject headings. In the USA, the National Archives and Records Administration has introduced its Capstone policy for capturing e-mails. This involves the capture of records that should be preserved as permanent from the e-mail accounts of officials at or near the top of an agency or an organizational subcomponent. The agency is responsible for identifying Capstone accounts, but NARA suggests capturing the accounts of heads of departments and independent agencies; their deputies and assistants; the heads of program offices and staff offices including assistant secretaries, administrators, and commissioners; directors of offices, bureaus, or equivalent; principal regional officials; staff assistants to those aforementioned officials, such as special assistants, confidential assistants, and administrative assistants; and career Federal employees, political appointees, and officers of the Armed Forces serving in equivalent or comparable positions. (Capstone, 2013)

The agencies will have to take steps to ensure the security of such e-mails to prevent unauthorized access, insertion or deletion. They will need to ensure that an appropriate level of metadata is created; at a minimum, this should include date of the e-mail and the names and e-mail addresses of all senders and recipients. The possibility of providing links to e-mail attachments should be considered. The officials whose accounts are being captured will have the opportunity to delete ephemeral items from their accounts. On the face of it, this is a sensible approach, which recognizes that steps have to be taken to identify key collections of e-mails without going down the impossible road of selecting individual e-mails or e-mail strings. There are, however, clearly potential hazards with this approach, since it appears to take a purely top-

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down view of organizations and assumes that future historians will wish to approach their research in this way. It would do nothing for the many individual former residents of state-run children’s homes who are anxious to see their own records and not the records produced by senior staff members with whom they may never have interacted.

Digitized records There are real dangers with digitized records. There are risks that some digitized records cannot be understood, or information in them cannot be found. There are three kinds of issues. First, there are contextual problems – contextual metadata is as important for digital surrogates as it is for borndigital material. Digital surrogates are by their nature separated from their original format and context in the process of digitization and there is a risk that the richness of their meaning will be lost as they become decontextualized. In other words, since digitized materials are typically not situated within their original context they are prone to being experienced and interpreted in ways that were unintended (Beaudoin, 2012). Second, there are scope issues. Some British newspapers in the 19th century, such as Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper or Reynold’s Newspaper, published several separate editions to take account of regionally dispersed readers and late-breaking news. Sadly, this was not taken into account by the people responsible for their digitization and the digital versions sometimes omit stories which are found in the microfilm copies (Crone and Halsey, 2013, 102). Finally, there are quality issues with digitization. In order to get a reliable index, the optical character recognition software used in digitization needs to identify more than 80% of the words on a page. If such a level can be achieved, then search engines which use fuzzy logic can ensure that 95% to 98% of words can be retrieved. In the case of the Nineteenth Century British Library Newspaper Database, researchers found that only a quarter of newspapers had a significant word accuracy of above 80% and the overall accuracy was 68.4%. The quality of the digitized versions of the Burney Collection of 18th-century newspapers was even worse. Only 48% of the significant words in the collection are correctly transcribed, as a result of poor OCR. This makes the other 52% completely un-findable (Tanner, Muñoz and Ros, 2009).

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The Reading Experience Database is a collection of material from 1450 to 1945 giving evidence of people’s reading of print or written material. The database contains over 30,000 entries and each entry contains a snippet from the source of the evidence. Although immensely interesting, the database contains inherent biases which have been publicly acknowledged by the scholars who produced it. One is that some of the material comes from crowdsourcing and some writers are more popular with contributors to the database than others – there are 405 entries for Robert Louis Stevenson (all contributed by members of the Stevenson Society), but only one for Arthur Conan Doyle, although it can be seen from his autobiography and other sources that Conan Doyle was a voracious reader. Similarly, 78% of the 19th-century evidence concerns books and only 7% newspapers but newspaper reading was probably more common than book reading at the time. Equally, the preponderance of evidence from the diaries of famous people tends to overwhelm the evidence from sociological surveys, court records and observational surveys and thus there is far less evidence about the reading habits of servants or other working-class readers. Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey (2013), who wrote about the Reading Experience Database, drew attention to the need for rigorous care when using online resources: ‘The skills of evaluation and interpretation are crucial to understanding material discovered online but are generally underdeployed in a culture that values fast information in the same way that it values fast food’. A number of countries have undertaken large digitization programmes to convert paper records to digital formats that can be more easily processed and exchanged. However, this has not always proved to be successful – a recent World Bank report (Lemieux, 2015, 13) said that ‘the mistake of thinking that digitization alone solves information problems has led to a number of poor outcomes for countries, such as loss of access to trustworthy original records, uncertainty about the integrity of digital surrogates, and even loss or irretrievability of digital copies of records. Digitization has proven to be no panacea.’ Perhaps the best place to begin to remedy some of these issues would be to provide researchers with more information about the digital resources they are searching. Publishers should be much more open about the sources they have used, and allow researchers to have access to the OCR transcript of the text, which would allow them to make a full assessment of its scope

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and limits. The alternative is to continue to behave in the way Tim Hitchcock (2011) describes: ‘We use the Burney collection regardless – entirely failing to apply the kind of critical approach that historians have built their professional authority upon. This is roulette dressed up as scholarship.’

More information equals less knowledge The second paradox of digital openness is that more records might mean less information and certainly less knowledge. The problem is that a huge volume of records, coupled with a shortage of contextual information, means that future researchers will effectively be dipping their hands into an information bran tub and pulling out snippets of information without seeing its true meaning because it will be deprived of context. MayerSchönberger (2011, 78, 90) said that circumstantial information is largely missing from an information snippet accessed through digital retrieval. He said that information becomes de- and re-contextualized when pieces of information are retrieved without their accompanying contexts and presented in a new context of search results. There are fundamental risks with really huge collections of records – ones which are too big for a human (or humans) to read and analyse. The obvious solution would be to use a search engine to explore the records, but, although Google is brilliant, say it returned 10,000 hits, only one of which contained the very precise piece of information which was being sought. There is a strong possibility that a human searcher facing that volume of hits would never find the nugget he or she required. A random collection of thousands of e-mails or what the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) still calls nightly telegrams was released by WikiLeaks. Even a casual examination of it suggests that archives cannot provide access to this scale of digital material through conventional catalogues. It is equally idle to suppose that order can be imposed on all but a fraction of content at the time of creation. We know that, at least in the UK, registries and file plans have all but vanished. What the archive will confront is a huge accumulation of formless stuff. For example, the emails from the Enron Company that were released during the legal investigations into the business consisted of 620,000 assorted e-mails and the only way that they could be analysed was by using advanced computing

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and statistical techniques (Klimt and Yang, 2004). These were developed at the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and in the History Lab and Department of Computing Science at Columbia University (Prabhakaran, Reid and Rambow, 2014). Research is going on into ways to visualize documents and the data generated by the analysis of content. Many web archive tools, such as Archive-It, provide a textual interface for interacting with the archived collections, while MIT is developing Themail to visualize the content of email boxes. As Tim Hitchcock (2013) points out, such visualizations at present tend to tell us what we know – ‘There was an industrial revolution involving iron. There was a war in the 1860s and so on.’ Equally, as Tobias Blanke and Andrew Prescott (2016) write, visualizations have to be treated with care, as self-evidently they only visualize what is there; for example, an NGram of the TNA catalogue will yield many references to proceedings in Chancery and almost none to those in the Court of the King’s Bench, largely because Chancery has been catalogued in much more detail. Probably the state-of-the-art tool at the moment is the National Library of Australia’s Trove system. This provides a consolidated search of the National Library’s catalogues of books as well as catalogues of archives and manuscripts, music, dance, pictures, web archives and digitized newspapers from a wide range of institutions. It has powerful features allowing users to comment or correct text or add material. Currently it holds descriptions of over half a billion items ranging from newspaper articles to whole books and must be the point of departure for anyone beginning research on Australian topics. The issues raised for humanities scholars by the availability of digital and digitized texts were neatly summarized by the Cornell-based information scientist, David Mimno: Humanities scholarship has traditionally focused on the careful, detailed reading of small numbers of high-value texts. Over the past five to ten years, large-scale digitization projects have vastly increased the quantity of cultural heritage material, to scales well beyond the amount of text any single scholar could meaningfully process. This development raises a vital question: how, if at all, should the work of humanistic scholarship adapt to the presence of orders of magnitude more potential source material? From the perspective of traditional scholarship, little has changed: the fact that most of recorded human intellectual

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output is now accessible does not increase the ability of a scholar to read it. Clearly, any fundamental advances must come from the fact that this material is now available for computational processing. (Mimno, 2012, 1)

Over the past few years, humanities scholars have begun to use a range of tools and techniques. These include text mining, topic modelling (looking for groups of words in texts) and social network analysis. By text-mining the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to discover who knew whom between 1500 and 1700 and using social network analysis tools, researchers at Carnegie Mellon (2015) and Georgetown Universities were able to produce a sophisticated map of the social network of early modern England. With Francis Bacon, the early-17th-century thinker at its centre, the map illustrates over 200,000 relationships between more than 13,000 individuals. Other organizations are developing sophisticated tools and services that allow digital content to be interpreted in radically different ways. For example, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is experimenting with new sense-making tools to assist embassies to interpret the streams of data they receive. In one study they produced a map of the social network of the Twitter followers of consuls general and ambassadors. By understanding more about their Twitter followers, the diplomats should be able to produce more relevant tweets (Collins, 2014). The problem of the huge volume of digital records has posed real difficulties in the field of legal discovery. This is the process whereby parties to a legal action are obliged to produce documents which are relevant to the case. The volume of electronically stored records that must be considered for relevance continues to grow and continues to present a challenge to the parties. In the USA, the cost of e-discovery can easily be in the millions of dollars. According to some commentators, these costs threaten to skew the justice system, as they can easily exceed the amount at risk. Discovery is a major source of costs in litigation, sometimes accounting for as much as 25% of the total cost, and has had a huge impact on the legal profession (Roitblat, Kershaw and Oot, 2010). Jonathan Maas of Ernst and Young talked of cases involving tens of millions of records which might be relevant (White, 2011). Law firms also increasingly have to face the fact that records are rapidly moving to other platforms and away from central registries. Increasingly, companies subject to litigation have to

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recover data from mobile devices, which present particular difficulties of file formats and information completeness (Allen and Herman, 2014). Others have to recover pages from staff members’ social media accounts. There are increasing concerns about cloud-based storage solutions – it is easy to use the cloud to store documents, but do contracts cover the rapid return of large volumes of data in the event of litigation? Technology is coming to the aid of companies involved in e-discovery. Until recently, lawyers relied on simple keyword searching to identify relevant material, but recently, more sophisticated machine learning systems which provide what is called predictive coding have been developed. A lawyer will review a sample set of documents and the machine will learn from what is selected as relevant and will apply that learning to the whole corpus of material. Further iterations and samplings are carried out until the lawyer declares that further review is unlikely to yield any more significant documents. The lawyer can determine the confidence level or degree of certainty required. Instead of simple keyword searches, the machine can look for content, context or metadata and can calculate the likely relevance of documents (Hampton, 2014). The US courts are accepting predictive coding as a legitimate way to conduct e-discovery and it saves large amounts of money. From an archival point of view, there is much interest in the possible application of e-discovery tools for sensitivity review of digital documents.

Authenticity Even if digital documents survive and have sufficient metadata to make them findable and usable, there are still issues with their authenticity – can users be sure that digital documents are authentic? The question of how the authenticity of records can be determined has occupied the thoughts of a number of distinguished archival thinkers. Luciana Duranti is famous for her work on applying the science of diplomatics to digital material. Diplomatics is the systematic analysis of documentary evidence – it involves developing typologies of documents by examining documents of common origin with a view to compiling a list of their common characteristics – material, physical structure, style of script, system of dating and orthography. Once a typology has been identified for records issued by an administrative body in a particular time-period, then

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it is possible to examine similar documents to determine whether they have been produced in a manner in keeping with others written in the same office. However, this only provides a partial test. Documents which are not genuine might carry many of the signs of diplomatic authenticity – for example, a forged charter copied into a monastic cartulary might be authentic from a diplomatic point of view. In order to deal with this potential problem, other tests can be applied. One is the question of legal authenticity – could a document be used as evidence in a court of law according to the national juridical tradition? This might mean that a document which failed some of the tests of diplomacy could be accepted in a court if it was accompanied by the attestation of a competent authority. Finally, a historical test can be applied – does a document convey a relatively accurate representation of an event, entity or sentiment? The forged charter would not be an accurate account of a transfer of a piece of land, but it would be valued as historically authentic because it dated from the Middle Ages and tells us something about the spirit of that period (Mak, 2012). Similarly, in Chapter 5 we discuss the historical value of forged documents relating to the life of William Shakespeare. There has been work to develop standards concerning the authenticity of records, notably the Preservation Metadata Maintenance Activity and the Open Archival Information System. However, deciding on whether a digital record is genuine or not is still very much a matter of judgement. There has been some recent research on the way in which computer scientists determine the credibility of data sets. They appear to rely on a range of tests. They regard statements about provenance as important, but they also rely on their own assessment of the data content, on their own experience and pre-existing knowledge. The research found that each of these factors was useful, but none was sufficient in isolation: optimum judgements depended on combining them all (Yeo, 2013, 224). If even computer scientists have to rely on a range of factors when assessing the authenticity of digital documents, then is there any absolute test? Indeed, is there any absolute proof of authenticity? Writers ranging from the 17th to the 21st centuries have stated that it is impossible to establish the total authenticity of a document. Jean Mabillon, writing in the 17th century, took the view that absolute certainty about the authenticity of a document was impossible; any statement about the genuineness of a document could never be more than an informed opinion.

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According to David Knowles, Mabillon understood that authenticity could only be determined after an expert had examined a whole series of different indications. As a result, the certainty attainable in a favourable case could be no more than a moral certainty. David Nicholas (2017) has analysed the way in which the new generation of digital natives determine the trustworthiness of information on the internet. They appear to rely on cross-comparison, asking friends on Facebook or Twitter, reading reviews, relying on Google. For some, the traditional view that organizations which have been established for a large number of years are inherently more reliable seems to work in the opposite way now. Moreover, younger people are inherently less likely to recognize traditional brands. This approach is closer to the postmodern view of authenticity in that it is highly contingent. Brigitte Bedos-Rezak said that ‘documents should be seen as at once true and false (a construct)’ (quoted in Mak, 2012, 5).

Capturing the archive Any effort to capture digital records requires effort and ingenuity and is vastly more difficult than in the paper world. The jihadist organization Islamic State (IS) is famous for its use of social media for propaganda. The anti-radicalization organization the Quilliam Foundation (Winter, 2015) attempted to capture all IS propaganda for the month of Shawwal (July to August) 2015. The undertaking was complex, partly because IS had a large number of separate media offices (about 35), most of which produced some form of propaganda. The main problem was that, because of the nature of their activities, IS faced pressure from Twitter, YouTube and similar organizations to prevent their material from being circulated. A complex cat-and-mouse game developed with IS seeking to circumvent attempts to block their material. This makes it very hard to identify and capture their propaganda output. Despite the complex issues involved, Quilliam was able to capture over 1100 media events in a month. However, it is not just jihadist organizations which are being forced into using subterfuge and secrecy to protect their digital resources and thus, potentially make it difficult for the record to be captured. In 2015, the Law Institute of Victoria, Australia (Moon, 2015) urged its members to use virtual private networking and offshore e-mail systems because of concerns that under Australia’s data retention scheme, law enforcement agencies have the right to access data

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about the communications of lawyers and their clients without a warrant. They argued that if the law enforcement agencies knew which witnesses lawyers were talking to, they could piece together their defence strategy. Clearly such hide-and-seek games make the work of capturing digital records harder and the likelihood of silences greater.

An existential threat to archives? The third paradox of the digital is that the growth of digital records might mean that the shape and function of archival institutions change over time – they might become smaller and change what they do. To some extent this development is the inevitable product of the digital revolution. Users of archives can and do take digital photographs of records in archive reading rooms and then post the images on websites, blogs, etc., where they can be mashed up, edited or merged into other documents. This practice has subverted the traditional power of archives, where records were seen in controlled circumstances in reading rooms and where they were only published by users after appropriate permissions had been obtained and appropriate fees paid. Records were very much owned by archives, existing either as paper originals or as tatty photocopies or as reproductions in books. Now the digital camera has set them free to have new independent lives. In addition, the development of cloud computing and software services means that much material which was traditionally stored in an organization’s servers or an individual’s computer is now stored who knows where? The sheer scale of collections of digital records means that it is beyond the technical and financial resources of all but the largest or wealthiest archives to store and deliver them. In the UK, The National Archives has a huge collection of government websites which for the past ten years was harvested, stored and delivered to users by an organization based in Paris.1 A more serious threat comes from the decision by archives to contract out to the private sector the delivery of their most popular records. This process began in the 1960s with the growth of companies such as University Microfilms (now Proquest), Chadwyck-Healey and Kraus Thomson, which marketed microfilms of records, books and newspapers to the academic sector. It really began to take off in the late 1990s when Ancestry, Inc., which had published a family history magazine and books, began to develop its online offering. Over the past 20 years, Ancestry has become

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the largest online genealogical company in the world. Owned by a group of private equity and investment companies, as well as its senior staff, Ancestry now has 2.26 million subscribers and generates revenues of $683 million. In 2014–15 its revenues grew by 10%; the enterprise value of the company in April 2016 was about $2.6 billion (Permira, 2016). Its success is down to three factors – effective marketing, including television advertising, an immensely sophisticated website with powerful search tools and great user contributions and, crucially, its huge resource of over 17 billion records copied from libraries and archives around the world. Its UK and Ireland records comprise 1804 (and rising) separate collections, including censuses, wills, military records, as well as series relating to emigration and immigration (Ancestry, 2016). Quite clearly, Ancestry and its smaller rivals have done an enormous service to users of archives and have done much to facilitate access to records. A ten-minute walk from my house brings me to the local public library where Hertfordshire County Council provides free access to both Ancestry and FindMyPast, another major family history site. In a book dedicated to improving access to archives, it might seem counterintuitive to raise concerns about what is a marvellous service which has put archives in the hands of all. But I feel obliged to raise a few notes of caution. At the same time as archives have licensed many of their most popular records to Ancestry and its smaller rival, FindMyPast, the numbers of physical visitors have declined. Between 2005 and 2013/14, visitor numbers to local authority archives fell. The proportion of adults who had visited an archive (in their own time or for voluntary work) when surveyed was 3%, a significant decrease from the 2005/06 level of 6%. If paid work visits and visits for academic study are included, the proportion of adults who said they had attended an archive in the last year had also fallen since 2008/09 from 5% to 4% in 2013/14. At the same time, visitors to archives are growing older: the Public Services Quality Group (PSQG) survey from 2012 shows a clear trend: visitors to archives are older than in 2006. There were 9% fewer people visiting archives aged 44–64 in 2007 than in 2012. Conversely, the 65–74 age bracket has seen a 5% increase as has the over 70s, which is up by 3% (The National Archives, 2014). In the long term, increased reliance on licensing copies of records to Ancestry and other family history companies may well pose a serious threat to archives for three reasons:

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• As already stated, archives have effectively contracted out the most popular area of their services. Although The National Archives counts the images delivered via Ancestry among the total number of digital images it supplies, customers use these images, along with a range of records from many other archives through the Ancestry site. A direct link with customers has been lost. • The technology which Ancestry is able to offer is very good and, within its limited scope of family history, better than most archival websites. • While the reason for the decline in the number of people visiting archives has not been satisfactorily explained, the relationship between the growth of powerful online family history websites and the decline in the numbers of visitors may be causality rather than merely coincidence. Let us consider archives as a business seeking external funding. Its business model would have to state that because of the development of digital cameras it has lost control over part of its product, changes in technology are forcing it to reconsider its traditional role of storing and delivering records, it has contracted out its most popular products and its physical user base is both shrinking and ageing. Clearly such issues impact on the long-term viability of archives and hence their ability to acquire and preserve records. There may be a danger that immediate access for the users of today is being achieved at the cost of a long-term decline in archival provision for the users of tomorrow. Funding bodies may well be reluctant to put money into organizations which are increasingly remote from their users and this may, in turn, impact on the long-term viability of archives and hence their ability to acquire and preserve records. However, there is increasing pressure from internet activists and others to allow free access to resources. Currently, the practice of charging for access to academic publications is under serious attack both from activists and universities (Jackson, 2016) and it is possible that this attack may shift towards the online providers of archival records. Is there an alternative? The development of the Digital Public Library of America may be one model (Darnton, 2013). This body, which was launched in 2013, is designed to make the holdings of America’s research

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libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans – and eventually to everyone in the world – online and free of charge. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content. At first, its offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections – books, manuscripts, and works of art that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core, it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library. Crucially, it is a distributed system, which means that users are constantly aware of and have a link to the institution which holds the records they are using. There is eventually a possibility of a global network of free content, since the DPLA is designed to be interoperable with Europeana, the EUsponsored content aggregator. Doubtless there would be difficulties in establishing an English or UK equivalent of the DPLA, not least the possible loss of revenue which archives earn from family history companies, but the long-term benefit in terms of openness and accessibility of resources is enormous.

The future It is very hard for people to recognize a real revolution and it is always tempting to see it in terms of current practices. This can be clearly seen from the end of the stagecoach era in Britain. In 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened and from then on it was fairly clear that stagecoaches could not compete. The reaction of coach proprietors was not to accept the inevitable and move on, but to try to collaborate or compete with the railways. At first they tried putting their coaches onto railway wagons for part of the journey, but this was largely unsuccessful because sparks from the engine would set fire to the coaches. Some tried to cut costs and run their coaches in direct competition with the trains, but they could not compete on speed or price. Only a very few, notably William Chaplin, the largest proprietor of all, sold their coaches and put their money into the railways. Perhaps we need to see that the move to the digital is a bigger revolution than the railways and begin to think of new and purely digital ways of delivering authentic and accessible records in what is now a post-paper world. It is worth considering whether we are not misunderstanding the nature of digital records. Much of the literature (and there is a lot of it) seems to

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be based on the assumption that digital documents can be made to have the same characteristics as paper ones – they are unique, they can be authentic, they can have good metadata, they can have a known context. But the evidence is that they are not like this at all. Writing about the impact that the mass digitization of books has had on the historical profession, Tim Hitchcock said: We are within sight of that moment when all printed text produced between 1455 and 1923 . . . will be available online to search and to read. The vast majority of this digital text is currently configured to pretend to be made up of ‘books’ and other print artefacts. But, of course, it is not books. At some level it is just text – the difference between one book and the next is a single line of metadata. . . . Because history has been organized to be written from ‘books’, found in hard copy libraries, the transformation of books to texts forces us to question the methodologies of modern history writing. In other words, the book as a technology for packaging and delivery, storing, and finding text is now redundant. The underpinning mechanics that determined its shape and form are as antiquated as moveable type. And in the process of moving beyond the book, we have also abandoned the whole post-enlightenment infrastructure of libraries and card catalogues (or even OPACS), of concordances, and indexes, and tables of contents. They are all built around the book, and the book is dead. (Hitchcock, 2011)

The parallels with archives are obvious. The move from close to distant reading, the rapid increase in the volume of digital records and the invention of tools, such as the macroscope, for analysing and visualizing data, are changing the nature of the archive. It is coming to be reconceptualized as data to be made sense of, in a process Tobias Blanke and Andrew Prescott (2016) have characterized as ‘datafication of the humanities’. This data includes not just files, but social media and user-contributed input, all of which can be accessed via the internet. Moreover, the archive is no longer static. The essence of digital documents seems to be that they are not necessarily fixed. Mayer-Schönberger (2011, 62) has argued that digital culture emphasizes recombining and sharing over owning. He gives the example of Russian Goblin Movies, where the film makers redub Hollywood blockbusters into Russian but give them

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substantially altered narratives. The inventor of this genre is Dmitry Yuryevich Puchkov (Walsh, 2003), whose most famous work is his version of the Lord of the Rings, where Frodo Baggins is a bumbling Russian cop and the Orcs Russian gangsters. Cassie Findlay (2013) has suggested that new methods of determining even something as fundamental as the authenticity of records need to be developed in the digital world. Taking her cue from Julian Assange’s suggestion that the authenticity of records is revealed through human and organizational behaviour – how hard will someone fight to defend a piece of information or conceal it – she suggested that tests of authenticity should be rethought so that they acknowledge behaviours and move away from positivist ideas of an authentic record.

Conclusion Despite short-term concerns, it is essential that archivists readjust their view of their collections if they are not to become curators of a silent archive – they need to move to a situation where they see archival collections as moving online and as developing totally different characteristics – becoming fluid and susceptible to analysis by a range of sophisticated tools and where the old nostrums of metadata, original order and even original records have lost their power.

Note 1 Internet Memory Foundation, http://internetmemory.org/en/index.php/about/collections1.

References Allan, A. (2015) Review of Government Digital Records, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 486418/Report_-_Digital_Records_Review.pdf. Allen, H. and Herman, D. (2014) Challenges of Mobile Devices, BYOD and e Discovery, Law Technology Today, 19 September, www.lawtechnologytoday.org/2014/09/challenges-of-mobile-devices-byod-andediscovery/.

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Ancestry (2016) http://search.ancestry.co.uk/search/cardcatalog.aspx#ccat=hc=25&dbSort= 1&sbo=1&fsk=CIAABNEAAAB9&fh=75&. Appel, R., Clemens, A., Hagenmaier, W. and Meyerson, J. (2015) Born-Digital Access in Archival Repositories: mapping the current landscape, preliminary report, https://docs.google.com/document/d/15v3Z6fFNydrXcGfGWXA4xzyWlivirf UXhHoqgVDBtUg/edit# . Archives New Zealand (n.d.) Digital Continuity Action Plan, https://web.archive.org/web/20130703110049/http://archives.govt.nz/advice/ digital-continuity-programme/digital-continuity-action-plan. Association of Research Libraries (2012) Spec Kit 329, Managing Born Digital Collections and Archival Materials, http://publications.arl.org/Managing-BornDigital-Special-Collections-and-Archival-Materials-SPEC-Kit-329/17. Beaudoin, J. E. (2012) Context and its Role in the Digital Preservation of Cultural Objects, D-Lib Magazine, 18 (11/12), http://dlib.org/dlib/november12/beaudoin/11beaudoin1.html. Blanke, T. and Prescott, A. (2016) Dealing with Big Data. In Griffin, G. and Hayler, M. (eds), Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities, Edinburgh University Press, 184–205. Cabinet Office (2014) Government Security Classifications, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-securityclassifications. Capstone (2013) www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2013/2013-02.html. Carnegie-Mellon (2015) www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2015/october/francis-bacon-launch.html. Chapman, J. C. (2010) Observing Users: an empirical analysis of user interaction with online finding aids, Journal of Archival Organization, 8 (1), 4–30. Chowcat, I. (2015) Spotlight on the Digital: recent trends and research in scholarly discovery behaviour, Jisc, https://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/wp/files/2015/10/spotlight_literature_ review_sept2015.pdf. Collins, D. (2014) Ambassador Twitter Networks, https://gdsdata.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/15/ambassador-twitter-networks. Crone, R. and Halsey, K. (2013) On Collecting, Cataloguing and Collating the Evidence of Reading: the ‘RED movement’ and its implications for digital scholarship. In Weller, T. (ed.), History in the Digital Age, Routledge, 95–110. Daniels, M. G. and Yakel, E. (2010) Seek and You May Find: successful search in

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online finding aid systems, American Archivist, 73 (2) 535–68. Darnton, R. (2013) ‘The National Digital Public Library is Launched’, New York Review of Books, 25 April, www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/04/25/nationaldigital-public-library-launched/. Denham, E. (2015) Access Denied: record retention and disposal practices of the Government of British Columbia, Investigation Report F15–03, Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia. Findlay, C. (2013) People, Records and Power: what archives can learn from WikiLeaks, Archives and Manuscripts, 41 (1), 7–22. Gollins, T. (2009) Parsimonious Preservation: preventing pointless processes!, paper delivered to Online Information Conference, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/informationmanagement/parsimonious-preservation.pdf. Halliday, J., MacAskill, E. and Perraudin, F. (2015) British Pilots Took Part in Anti-ISIS Bombing Campaign in Syria, Guardian Online, 17 July, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/17/british-pilots-took-part-in-antiisis-bombing-campaign-in-syria. Hampton, W. M. (2014) Predictive Coding: it’s here to stay, Practical Law, The Journal, June/July, 28–32. Hitchcock, T. (2011) Academic History Writing and Its Disconnects, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1 (1), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/academichistory-writing-and-its-disconnects-by-tim-hitchcock. Hitchcock, T. (2013) http://historyonics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/big-data-fordead-people-digital.html. Image and Data Manager (2015) Turnbull defends private e-mail server, 9 October, http://idm.net.au/article/0010708-turnbull-defends-private-emailserver. Jackson, B. (2016) Just about Anything You Want, London Review of Books, 38 (19), 6 October, 19–22. Klimt, B. and Yang, Y. (2004) Introducing the Enron Corpus, https://bklimt.com/papers/2004_klimt_ceas.pdf. Knapton, S. (2015) Vital Information Could be Lost in ‘Digital Dark Age’ Warns Professor, Telegraph Online, 11 October, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11922192/Vital-informationcould-be-lost-in-digital-dark-age-warns-professor.html. Lemieux, V. L. (2015) One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward? Does E-government make governments in developing countries more transparent and accountable?, World

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Bank Right to Information Working Papers. Lynch, C. (2002) Digital Collections, Digital Libraries and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information, First Monday, 7 (5), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/949/870. Mak, B. (2012) On the Uses of Authenticity, Archivaria, 73, 1–17. Mason, R. and Watt, N. (2015) Freedom of Information Act Misused by Media to Create Stories, Says Grayling, Guardian Online, 29 October, www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/29/freedom-of-informationjournalists-chris-grayling-foi. Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2011) Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age, Princeton University Press. Mimno, D. (2012) Computational Historiography: data mining in a century of classics journals, ACM Journal of Computing in Cultural Heritage, 5 (1), 1–19. Moniz, J. (2015 ) When Should Governments Delete E-mails, Post-Bulletin, 9 October, www.govtech.com/dc/articles/When-Should-Governments-DeleteEmails.html. Moon, P. (2015) Data Retention Causes Boom in Privacy Software – Until the Axe Falls, AFR Weekend, 19 October, www.afr.com/technology/data-retentioncauses-boom-in-privacy-software-20151015-gka5p5. Moss, M. (2005) The Hutton Inquiry, the President of Nigeria and What the Butler Hoped to See, English Historical Review, 120, 577–92. Moss, M. (2012) Where Have All the Files Gone? Lost in Action Points Every One?, Journal of Contemporary History, 47 (4), 860–75. National Archives of Australia (2015) Digital Continuity 2020 Policy, www.naa.gov.au/records-management/digital-transition-and-digitalcontinuity/digital-continuity-2020/index.aspx. Nicholas, D. (2014) The Google Generation, the Mobile Phone and the ‘Library’ of the Future: implications for society, governments and libraries. In Noorhidawati, A. et al., (eds), Proceedings of the International 5th Conference on Libraries, Information and Society, ICoLIS, http://ciber-research.eu/download/ 20141105-Malaysia_Nicholas_keynote.pdf, 1–8. Nicholas, D. (2017) How Current and Future Users Will Access Archives: you might not want to know, paper presented to the ‘Is there a democratic deficit in archives’ conference, Northumbria University, 24–25 January. Pear, R. (2008) In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion, New York Times, 12 September, www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/13records.html. Permira (2016) http://origin.permira.com/media/17247/ancestry-fourth-quarter-

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and-full-year-2015-financial-results.pdf. Popular Mechanics (2006) The Digital Ice Age (December), www.popularmechanics.co.za/tech/the-digital-ice-age/. Prabhakaran, V., Reid, E. E. and Rambow, O. (2014) Gender and Power: how gender and gender environment affect manifestations of power, Columbia University, Vinod Papers, www1.cs.columbia.edu/~vinod/papers/EMNLP_genderpaper_final.pdf. Prael, A. and Wickner, A. (2015) Getting to Know FRED: introducing workflows for born-digital content, Practical Technology for Archives, 4, http://practicaltechnologyforarchives.org/issue4_prael_wickner. Public Interest Declassification Board (2012) Transforming the Security Classification System. Public Interest Declassification Board (2014) Setting Priorities: an essential step in transforming declassification. Roitblat, H. L., Kershaw, A. and Oot, P. (2010) Document Categorization in Legal Electronic Discovery: computer classification vs. manual review, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 61 (1), 70–80. Rosenthal, D. (2013) blog post, Rothenberg still wrong, http://blog.dshr.org/2013/02/rothenberg-still-wrong.html . Rothenberg, J. (1995) Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents, Scientific American, 272 (1), 42–7. Rothenberg, J. (1999) Avoiding Technological Quicksand: finding a viable technical foundation for digital preservation, Council on Library Resources, Report, www.clir.org/pubs/reports/rothenberg/pub77.pdf. Tanner, S., Muñoz, T. and Ros, P. H. (2009) Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: lessons learned from assessing the OCR accuracy of the British Library’s 19th century online newspaper archive, D-Lib Magazine, 15 (7/8), www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html. The National Archives (2011) Understanding Digital Continuity, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/ understanding-digital-continuity.pdf. The National Archives (2014) Digital Services and Archive Audiences: local authority archives 2014, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/Digital_Services_and_ Archive_Audiences_2014.pdf. Trevett, C. (2015) PM Cleared over Text Message Deletion, New Zealand Herald, 15 September,

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http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11513398. Vasagar, J. (2012) Michael Gove Aides Accused of Deleting Government Correspondence, The Guardian, 2 March, www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/mar/02/michael-gove-email-privateaccount. Veritas Technologies (2016) The Databerg Report: see what others don’t, identify the value, risk and cost of your data, www.veritas.com/content/dam/Veritas/docs/reports/veritas-strike-globalreport_a4-sdc2.pdf. Vincent, J. (2005) An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd. Walsh, N. P. (2003) Russia’s Cult Video Pirate Rescripts Lord of The Rings as Gangster Film, The Guardian, 22 June, www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/22/film.lordoftheringsfilms. White, R. (2011) Taming the Data Monster, Briefing on E-Discovery, 16, 5–8. Winter, C. (2015) Documenting the Virtual ‘Caliphate’, Quilliam Foundation, www.quilliaminternational.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/ FINAL-documenting-the-virtual-caliphate.pdf.. Yeo, G. (2013) Trust and Context in Cyberspace, Archives and Records, 34 (2), 214–34. Yeo, G. (2017), Continuing Debates about Description. In Eastwood, T. and MacNeil, H. (eds), Currents of Archival Thinking, Libraries Unlimited, 163–92. Thanks to Geoffrey Yeo for allowing us a preview of his chapter. Zurcher, A. (2016) Hillary Clinton Emails – What’s It All About?, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31806907.

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CHAPTER 4 Dealing with the silence Valerie Johnson

Introduction In this chapter, we investigate silence in the archives: those silences created where records have not been kept, deliberately or otherwise; where some voices have been privileged over others; where voices have been silenced. This chapter will explore these silences, and what can be done to find some echoes and whispers – and sometimes shouts of strong appropriation – to fill the void.

False silences But first, we need to deal with the concept of the ‘false’ silence. In her final book Lisa Jardine, an ardent user of archives, wrote of the need to be aware of the siren call of the archive that is ‘missing’ and set out her book as ‘a cautionary tale about the trust we historians place in documents and records, and how badly we want each precious piece of evidence to add to the historical picture. And it is a story which illustrates in a number of ways the essential uncertainty which underlies, and ultimately gives purpose to, archival research in the humanities’ (Jardine, 2015, 1). What Jardine was referring to was the longing of historians and researchers to find that golden key which will unlock the secret they are investigating; and how this longing can sometimes lead to assumptions about the existence of evidence which does not in fact exist, or when it does, does not provide

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the hoped-for ‘Eureka!’ moment. Many archivists will attest to the researcher who says ‘But you must have it’, either believing that the archivist has not looked hard enough, or is concealing something. Sometimes, the hard truth is that the evidence is not, and never was, there.

False voices We also need to be fully aware of ‘false’ voices. In writing about voice; there can sometimes exist an implicit assumption that voices in the archives are always truthful voices. This is not the case: archives are not the ‘truth’, or always the bearers of truth. Verne Harris, an archivist from South Africa, who worked with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the post-apartheid era, described preserving and listing security police files from the apartheid regime, and how he and a colleague: were both disturbed at what these files contained – a destructive mix of misinformation and horrible truth, evidence of personal flaws and compromises, deeds of courage and deeds of betrayal. One day, he [the colleague] turned to me and, shaking his head, said: ‘Maybe they should have destroyed them all’. . . . The files we were dealing with had been conceptualised and used as instruments of oppression. They fell into the category of what Paul Ricoeur would call ‘bad memory’. (Harris, 2012, 148)

Though Harris goes on to describe how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s work was about ‘“good memory”, about turning the surviving files into what Eric Ketelaar has called “instruments of empowerment and liberation” ’, the impression one is left with is that of Ricoeur’s ‘bad memory’, of everything archives should not be: false; used to place dishonest evidence on record; nothing to do with the truth. And it is this too that needs always to be remembered when dealing with archives; that they are not ‘the truth’, and do not necessarily lead to ‘the truth’. Interestingly, Harris also continues, in the same article, to describe how, even when archives have not been deliberately constructed to propagate lies or pursue violence or oppression, their voice may not ring true or match other memories. He cites an instance of where his and his wife’s memories of the circumstances of their getting married differ sharply from a scrapbook of letters they find from their early courtship, letters which belie

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their remembrances, giving a very different impression. Interestingly, Harris uses the same metaphor used in this book – of speaking and voices – to state ‘the record does not speak for itself’ (Harris, 2012, 149). Archives are a form of memory, and record a truth. We must remember that it is not the whole or only truth.

Forcing open the doors: letting hidden voices speak With these caveats in mind, how do researchers approach situations where they really think there are silences that could be filled by material which exists but is not available? One answer is to use legislation, in particular, Freedom of Information legislation, as discussed in Chapter 1. Others hve resorted to quite the opposite, using illegitimate means to force open the doors and let voices speak, one of the more spectacular of which is leaking records. One of the most famous, or infamous, examples of this on an immense scale is WikiLeaks. As well as forcing a large-scale documentary body into the public arena, it has been described as ‘embodying . . . a renegotiation of the boundaries of knowledge and power that exist between the citizenry and the state, [and] has brought into sharp relief the unhelpful layers of bureaucracy and vested political interests that have blunted the power of archives in society’ (Findlay, 2013, 7). Findlay has further explored what she feels are the implications of WikiLeaks for archivists. She argues that, ‘The arrival of WikiLeaks at this particular point in history can teach archivists and recordkeepers some valuable lessons. Lessons which, if properly heeded, will enable the archival profession to actually deliver on some of our more grandiose claims about ensuring accountability for the powerful and healing and reparation for the weak’ (Findlay, 2013, 8). It is clear that Findlay considers that archivists should step up and own more responsibility for reflecting the needs of all in society, through archives, a theme that will be explored further in Chapter 6.

Filling the silence: allowing silent voices to speak However, there are many situations in the past where voices have not been captured, or have been silenced. How do historians and archivists find ways to hear these voices? There are ways of uncovering, recovering or developing other sources. In

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communities where written records are scarce or for whom memory is transmitted orally, there are ways of engaging with folk memory and traditions which can take the researcher back through time without the need for documents. In the UK, the British Library’s oral history project has a well deserved reputation for its work in capturing not only human sounds via projects like its National Life Stories project (www.bl.uk/projects/ national-life-stories), but also for capturing non-verbal sound such as music, which can not only speak in its own voice, but add cultural context to a new narrative. There are also very real examples of the actual recovery of records that particular regimes or bodies have tried to destroy or silence. There are the so-called Puzzle Women, sticking together files shredded by the Stasi in the dying days of the communist regime in East Germany (Funder, 2003, 262). Or the Iranians doing the same to files found in the American Embassy when students seized the building in Tehran in 1979, these latter documents stuck together and eventually published in volumes in Iran and eventually around the world (Sciolino, 1986). And these recovered voices are important. Archives can help to heal wounds in very challenging situations. Ketelaar’s article on archives as ‘spaces of memory’ deals with the role of archives in truth, justice and memory. Ketelaar writes about the use of records in Nazi trials at the end of World War II, and, more recently, in the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, as well as in the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the latter case, he tells of 22,000 people whose stories were recorded and made available in the archive of the Committee, and how ‘Many of the stories of victims and perpetrators were interwoven, a beginning of a shared story’ (Ketelaar, 2008, 10 and 16). It is these voices, formerly denied a hearing, that are so important. There has also recently been exploration about the role of records as actually speaking for themselves. Monteith has applied speech act theory to archival science to explore how the idea of performative speech, that is, ‘utterance through which one can be considered to have performed an act, such as a promise, a bet or a warning’ can be applied to archives (Monteith, 2010, 121). He uses the example of promissory notes to show how the documentary analogy might work, and to argue that there is potential for ‘illustrating the roles of records and the nature of social interactions within the communities their collections represent’ (Monteith, 2010, 130). And

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this is a pointer to where archives and the record aim to go: towards a place where the silencing of one voice, though significant, cannot silence the story, because the narrative is always greater, and other voices will come forward to speak; a production of social interaction, of political context, of a wider world which cannot be excluded from the record, and traces of which will always remain.

Acknowledging the silence as silence That said, there are clearly cases where voices are hard to find, and the historical trail fragile and almost erased. To articulate these scenarios, the idea of what has been called by Harrison ‘absent heritage’ has been defined. Harrison uses this term in his discussion of built heritage, to: refer to the ways in which the absences of partially or fully destroyed objects are conserved actively (e.g. in the case of the niche of the Bamiyan Buddhas which were destroyed by the Taliban and subsequently listed as a World Heritage Site, or the spectral traces of the former Berlin Wall which are actively memorialised by a double brick line which runs through the streets of Berlin) or passively (e.g. by not rebuilding or replacing something which has been partially destroyed) (Harrison, 2013, 585)

Though Harrison’s discussion relates to archaeological or built heritage, the same approach can be applied to archives, where at the very worst, some recognition and acknowledgement of what has gone is better than nothing: acknowledging and listening to the silence, when the voices that could have filled it speak only in a ghostly voice. Here, the ‘speaking’ of absence articulates paradoxically, but importantly, some form of presence. And this absence is not always a negative thing. Burton talks about the history of the archive as being ‘a history of loss’ (Burton, 2001). Steedman comments about history, that the pursuit of history ‘is an odd way of being in the world . . . whose practitioners believe [it] to be about what is not as much as what has been found’ (Steedman, 2001, xi). She states ‘that an absence is not nothing, but is rather the space left by what has gone: how the emptiness indicates how once it was filled and animated’ (Steedman, 2001, 11, italics in original). Later on in the same text, she explores how it is in these gaps that it is possible to read against the grain or find alternative

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voices, as we discuss further down. She points out that ‘texts . . . contain what apparently isn’t there at all: that they pull against their overt meaning, in the unregarded details, in chains of metaphors, in the footnotes; on all the wilder shores of signification that are signalled by punctuation marks; by absences, spaces, lacunae, all working against their overt propositions’ (Steedman, 2001, 40). In this sense, these silences do speak, contest and disrupt the standard narrative.

Filling the silence: finding alternative voices Where an original source has been destroyed – or perhaps never created – it is often possible to work around the gap. As implied above, it is rare that a single institution is involved in a transaction, or is the only voice in a narrative. The example of Suez in Chapter 1 shows exactly this scenario. Efforts by one party to obliterate the evidence may be unsuccessful if the other parties do not follow suit. If one country’s government records do not exist, other countries’ government records may do so (the French records referred to in Chapter 1). In addition, there may be other sources that shed strong light on events, and enable the historian or researcher to darn the hole with other thread. Continuing with the example of Suez, there is a wealth of material in the archive of the oil company, BP, used by its historian, James Bamberg, who devotes an entire chapter of one of its volumes to the Suez Crisis (Bamberg, 2000, 75–100). In addition, this alternative material may be important in approaching the subject from a different perspective, shedding new light or different lights on a subject area, allowing a multifaceted, more nuanced historical interpretation. Taken further, this can result not only in the uncovering of other existing voices, but in the expression of new voices with new stories and new ways of telling them. Van der Merwe discusses how Amy Sodaro has investigated: new commemorative forms which she terms ‘breakaway genres’ that challenge traditional modes of remembering or musealizing [sic]. Countries dealing with past human rights abuses and atrocities have found these new forms of commemoration, ‘spaces of repair and reparation’, as effective means to acknowledge victimization and past wrongs that move away from ‘hegemonic narratives to the emergence of alternative narratives and a democratic fragmentation of memory’ (Van der Merwe, 2015, 269)

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Van der Merwe discusses how embroidered story cloths in South Africa have enabled disempowered women to speak and record their own cultures and their own narratives about contemporary events such as the apartheid regime.

Reading voices back into history This kind of approach is clearly harder to do when one is looking into the history of centuries past. Here, living voices have died, and other methodologies have to be found. In these cases, some researchers have attempted to ‘read against the grain’ of archives – to identify and name the silences and thereby weaken their power, but also to re-insert ‘lost’ voices into the spaces that exist where they have been silenced through loss or suppression, disrupting narratives which have previously been monolithic in voice and power. There exists a long tradition of this in literature, with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea giving a voice to the first wife of Mr Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a woman suffering the effects of discrimination on the grounds of both her mental health and her race. Typical of this genre is that it allows the voices of those denied a past voice to speak. More recently, this approach has been employed by writers such as Sarah Waters, writing lesbian voices back into history, with works set both in the 19th century, such as Affinity, and the 20th, for example The Night Watch. In this ethos, what is important is not only what evidence is there, but how it is used. Sometimes, it is not that the voices are not there, but that they have been ignored in previous histories in favour of louder or more dominant voices. Arlette Farge has famously used French judicial and legal records to ‘recover’ the voices of ordinary citizens: the accused and witnesses to both petty and larger crimes in an era where the poor either could not or did not write their own records (Farge, 2013).

Looking forward: listening to all the voices The last decades of the 20th century, and the 21st century, have seen a seachange in attitudes towards inclusion generally, and that broader view has been reflected in attitudes towards archives and towards history. No longer is it acceptable to write history from a top-down Anglo-centric male

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viewpoint. There has been a continual emphasis on new viewpoints, be they different races, sexes, ethnicity, gender, or others. Oxford academic Peter Frankopan’s latest work The Silk Roads is subtitled A New History of the World and instead of a Euro- or Western-centric approach takes a Persian-centric viewpoint (Frankopan, 2016). Books which fail to consider broader viewpoints are quickly criticized. The recent five volume Oxford History of the British Empire series was immediately criticized on publication for containing little about women or from a non-white viewpoint, and soon after, a ‘Companion Series’ emerged, including one on Gender and Empire (Levine, 2004), and another on Black Experience and the Empire (Morgan and Hawkins, 2004). William Roger Louis, editor in chief of the series, even pointed out in the foreword that the Companion Series volumes ‘pursue themes that could not be covered adequately in the main series’ (Levine, 2004, Foreword). So how do historians face this challenge? Burton calls for historians ‘to be creative about what counts as an archive and to learn to recognize that history resides in any number of locations’ (Levine, 2004, 292). This corresponds with a move in archives over some years to recognize the idea of sense-making. Brenda Dervin has been a key figure in translating this idea into the information and archival sphere. Dervin has shown how this new emphasis on sense-making has emphasized knowledge and information seeking as diverse, complex and user centred, using ‘metaphors of situations, gaps and uses to depict information seeking and use as a sense-making process’ (Savolainen, 1995; Dervin, 1998 and 2003). Here, the focus has shifted to the user constructing their own sense and narrative – their own history – from the evidence they find, and an emphasis on multiple contextual voices rather than the finding of a universal monolithic truth.

Avoiding ‘white noise’: the need for some silence This links neatly to the need to address the issue of what archives can really do, and what they really represent. Sense-making emphasizes the individual nature of drawing meaning from archives, and obliquely makes the point that they are not a transcription of reality. And of course, they cannot be. Every record is partial, and cannot be otherwise. As Steedman points out, ‘nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there’ (Steedman, 2001, 45). And as a

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result, stories and histories can therefore never fully be reproduced from archival research. ‘The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory . . . The Archive is made from selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past and also from the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there’ (Steedman, 2001, 68). And this is not merely philosophical meandering, with no practical consequences. Nakata, writing about Aboriginal identity, wrote about who decided and who was ‘allowed’ to be deemed to belong to the Aboriginal community, and the need to ‘prove’ one’s entitlement. He asks halfway through his tale what this has to do with archives and then explains that: The full content and history of who we were does not lie in your archives. Nor does it lie fully in the memories and knowledge passed down by generations of Indigenous people in their local regions and communities. And nor do the future possibilities for Indigenous people rely on our access to these archives and our access to these community reference points. Our futures do not even rely on knowing any ‘truth’ of what we were or can now become. We all have material out of which to construct valid identities and lives. It is how we recognise contemporary lives and identities as the continuation of Indigenous histories that is at stake. (Nakata, 2012, 102)

Good historians should be aware of this. Burton, for example, talks about historians needing to use what she terms ‘strategic antagonism’ towards sources, for those interested in ‘a critical engagement with the past, rather than in its reproduction’ (Burton in Levine, 2004, 291). Farge talks about feeling ‘both the power of the contents of the archive and the impossibility of deciphering them. You realize that it is an illusion to imagine that one could ever actually reconstruct the past’ (Farge, 2013, 14). Equally, good archivists know that records are kept for a purpose, and predominantly reflect that purpose. Ketelaar reminds us of this in relation to the record of Nazi trials in Nuremberg, where the chief prosecutor made it clear that the record was partly being kept to prevent Holocaust and other denial (Ketelaar, 2008). Once again we stumble against the knowledge that archives are not ‘the truth’. And this is not simply in terms of viewing archives, as many postmodernists do, as reflecting structures of power, but inherently – no record can possibly capture everything.

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In a recent conference paper, archivist Jenny Haynes described her work appraising and rescuing the papers of scientists after their deaths. In these cases, families often contact the Wellcome Trust, a well known repository for the papers of science and medicine, to ask if they wish to take the papers. Haynes described one example of being given one day before the house of the deceased was cleared to be put on the market, arriving at a house with no heating, electricity or light, to find study, sitting room and garage stuffed with papers in no order, in piles on floors and furniture, and having to take on the responsibility of choosing what to keep and what to leave, in the full awareness that another archivist or she herself on another day might have chosen an entirely different ‘archive’ (Haynes, 2016). In this sense, even the archive that one has retains the ghostly presence of what it represents: a fragment of the whole; merely the surviving remains of all the papers of that person or collection.

Creating and welcoming the silence Holtorf has taken his point further, demonstrating how we not only create silences by destroying material in the construction of the archive, but in interacting with it, stating that ‘the appreciation and use of tangible heritage . . . brings with it destruction caused by the very presence of humans, their breath, movement and curiosity’. He goes on to point out that ‘Every form of display and accessibility to humans and even every act of conservation and restoration invariably affect and transform original substance involving some degree of loss’ (Holtorf, 2015). So we have a Catch-22: is there any value to archives that are never used? But in the very act of using or valuing them, we as users are inevitably eroding them, contributing irrevocably to their inevitable destruction. Archival conservators no longer talk about keeping in perpetuity: they know they simply cannot guarantee this. The recent Collections Demography research study1 was so aware of this that its point and purpose was to look specifically at trying to define at which point archives lost their value and why (if text had for example become illegible, worn off, or torn away). The researchers explored points of relative and absolute loss, when the archival record was seen to have lost all its value. But Holtorf went further, arguing that some loss of evidence is not only inevitable, but actually constitutive of heritage, arguing, for example, that

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the loss of some heritage increases or even creates value for that which is not lost. Citing the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001, he argues that ‘if heritage contributes to people’s collective identities, the loss of heritage can contribute to their identities even more’ (Holtorf, 2015, 406). Translating Kahnemann’s economic theory of loss aversion to the cultural heritage sphere (where people prefer to avoid losing something rather than to gain something of the same value), he discusses the emotional pull of the past, often seen as precious and fragile, and how cultural heritage operates around a paradigm of loss aversion. He argues for a greater idea of cultural heritage as being in the now, and meaning as being continually created. Pietrobruno takes an analogous position for cultural heritage in terms of performance art, arguing that ‘Live contemporary performances of intangible heritage may be orchestrated to embody past and outdated practices in an attempt to resist the change and revival that is at the core of living expressions. Hence, heritage re-enacted through its reproduction in and transmission through YouTube videos as well as its circulation on lists might suppress processes of revision that are integral to living performance’ (Pietrobruno, 2014, 744). Harrison takes a similar approach, arguing that a more inclusive approach has resulted in a situation where we: have simply continued to add to existing heritage lists and registers, allowing them to swell and replicate. With all of these factors contributing to the exponential growth of heritage in the late modern world, we have very rarely considered processes by which heritage objects, places and practices might be removed from these lists, deaccessioned from museums and galleries or allowed to fall into ruin without active intervention. (Harrison, 2013, 580)

There seems, therefore, to be a movement towards a liberation of cultural heritage from ossification, towards heritage as dynamic, constitutive of change, and open to adaptation and renewal; and, ironically, to see efforts to conserve and preserve as inimical to the development of living cultural heritage, where loss is seen as good and as liberation from fixity, freedom from an overbearing respect of the past, where what has been valued continues to remain so without needing or even being allowed to be reappraised. Harrison is explicit:

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the process of forgetting is in fact integral to remembering . . . one cannot properly form new memories and attach value to them without also selecting some things to forget. I contend that the same is true of heritage, and that as a result of the increasingly broad definition of heritage, and the exponential growth of listed objects, places and practices of heritage in the contemporary world, we risk being overwhelmed by memory, and in the process making all heritages ineffective and worthless. (Harrison, 2013, 580)

This seems to be something the built heritage community has embraced and explored with some depth. Morris suggests this will be something that will increase (and we only have to think of the destruction of ancient texts in Timbuktu and the deliberate multiple destruction by ISIL recently in Syria to think that he may be right), and again makes the case for a positive view of absence, claiming ‘absence secures a future for the site of a plurality of voices’ (Morris, 2014). In the archival sphere, Harris shares this view, citing Heidegger’s epithet ‘remembering is possible only on the basis of forgetting’. He goes on to explore how ‘the notion of total recall – of a memory which absorbs and holds all – is monstrous’, relating the need to forgive, and crucially to forget, as being at the heart of what it means to be human, a belief of particular poignancy given the context of Harris’ discussion of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He also goes on to rehearse what has been outlined above, that the idea of a completely full narrative is impossible, that narrative is as a result inevitably selective, and that it therefore necessarily involves loss. He pithily quotes Paul Ricoeur as stating, like Hiedegger, that ‘Forgetting is imbricated in remembering’. Interestingly, this point is also explored in the short story ‘Funes the Memorious’ (Funes el Memorioso) by Jorge Luis Borges, which tells the story of a poor boy from the outskirts of Fray Bentos who, as a result of a horse riding accident, is able to remember everything (Borges, 2000). There is a sense that this potential crystallization of the archive comes at a price: starting to fictionalize or control heritage, collapsing its complexity into simplicity and staticism, often accompanied by claims to own or control the authentic reality. In this way, to some extent, we return to the issue again of the dominant narrative, perhaps a government wishing to convey a particular view to tourists for example, or a particular political viewpoint (see for example, Falser (2014)). In order to avoid this, there is a

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need for a modern, dynamic concept that is able to re-invent and recreate itself as a living entity. Ironically enough, this has to exist for heritage to maintain its authenticity. This loss of fixity has been embraced by many archival theorists, with archives now increasingly viewed as dynamic. The emphasis here has been less on the idea of loss, and more on the positive, as a means of constant re-creation. Ketelaar, amongst others, has written about the continuous present, if you like, of archives, where, with every interaction and use, the archives is in a sense renewed and re-created (Ketelaar, 2008, 12). Harris sums this up, reflecting on the role of the archivist: For the trouble with the [archival] trace is that it never speaks for itself . . . traces in archives – they are narrativized, wrapped in a story, patterned by a narrative. Memory is narrativized over and over again, with each movement of recall and re-inscription. . . . Always with the trace, there must be a reckoning with more than evidence of what is past. Always already, there is also story, there is imagination and there is future . . . Which is why, in deconstructive and other post-positivist accounts of archives, meaning and significance in archives is unstable, imbricated in ever-shifting contexts, determined, in principle, by a future which is always coming. (Harris, 2012, 153)

Conclusion As this chapter shows, there is much that can be done to fill the silence: allowing silent voices to speak, finding alternative voices, reading voices back into the past, and ensuring in the future that more voices are considered in the telling. But there will always remain material that will not survive. Verne Harris, the South African archivist expressed this very clearly when he described how records creators and managers destroy a substantial proportion of the records they create, and archivists only end up selecting a small proportion of the residue (see Chapter 1, p. 14). Yet, though we should not be complacent, we should be grateful for what does survive, and applaud the integrity and courage of those who do battle to preserve the record for posterity. Oriana Fallaci (1975), an Italian feminist author, talks in her ground-breaking work Lettera a un Bambino Mai Nato of the delusion of believing that tomorrow will be better, a rejection of what in Britain is known as Whig history, an inevitable movement of

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progress and enlightenment. However, in this case, there seems genuinely to have been a shift, a strong and sure move towards inclusion and diversity in archival and record-keeping practice, as well as in history and elsewhere. Carter and Orange have talked about what they call a ‘human rights museology’. As they state: Museums, whose collections and displays once served to demonstrate the wealth and power of founding collectors or the state, are today being recast as instigators of social activism, sometimes against the oppression of those same state actors. With the increased emphasis on inclusion and diversity that are the hallmarks of postmodern museology, museums are evolving as ideal venues for empowering community members to address social issues and human rights abuses. (Carter and Orange, 2012, 111)

They discuss how museums, with their emphasis on memory and the past, are crucially important in representing abuses, and how there is much more humility as to the authority with which curators approach their work and others (Longair, 2015). Finally, we must always remember that the past is in the past. Steedman points out that in the end, ‘the past . . . does not, in fact live in the record [sic] office, but is rather, gone (that is its point; that is what the past is for); . . . parchment . . . does not in fact speak. It is a dream that the Historian makes in the Archive’ (Steedman, 2001, 81). We must never confuse dream with reality.

Note 1 See www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/ucl-mp122115.php.

References Bamberg, J. (2000) British Petroleum and Global Oil 1950–1975: the challenge of nationalism, Cambridge University Press. Borges, J. L. (2000) Fictions, Penguin edn. Burton, A. (2001) Thinking Beyond the Boundaries: empire, feminism, and the domains of history, Social History, 26 (1), 60–71. Burton, A. (2004) Archive Stories: gender in the making of imperial and

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colonial histories. In Levine, P. (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford University Press, 281–93. Carter, J. and Orange, J. (2012) Contentious Terrain: defining a human rights museology, Museum Management and Curatorship, 27 (2), 111–27. Dervin, B. (1998) Sense-making Theory and Practice: an overview of user interests in knowledge seeking and use, Journal of Knowledge Management, 2 (2), 36–46. Dervin B. (2003) Given a Context by Any Other Name: methodological tools for taming the unruly beast. In Dervin, B. and Foreman-Wernet, L. (eds), Sense-Making Methodology Reader: selected writings of Brenda Dervin, Hampton Press, NJ, 111–32. Dillon, C., Lindsay, W., Taylor, J., Fouseki, K., Bell, N. and Strlic, M. (2013) Collections Demography: stakeholders’ views on the lifetime of collections. In Ashley-Smith, J., Burmester, A. and Eibl, M. (eds), Climate for Collections Conference, Munich, Doerner Institut, 7–9 November 2012, Postprints, Archetype, London, 45–58. Fallaci, O. (1975) Lettera a un Bambino Mai Nato, Bur. Falser, M. S. (2014) From a Colonial Reinvention to Postcolonial Heritage and a Global Commodity: performing and re-enacting Angkor Wat and the Royal Khmer Ballet, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (7–8), 702–23. Farge, A. (2013) The Allure of the Archives, Yale University Press. Findlay, C. (2013) People, Records and Power: what archives can learn from WikiLeaks, Archives and Manuscripts, 41 (1), 7–22. Frankopan, P. (2016) The Silk Roads: a new history of the world, Bloomsbury. Funder, A. (2003) Stasiland: stories from behind the Berlin Wall, Granta. Harris, V. (1997) Claiming Less, Delivering More: a critique of positivist formulations on archives in South Africa, Archivaria, 44, 132–41. Harris, V. (2012) Genres of the Trace: memory, archives and trouble, Archives and Manuscripts, 40 (3), 147–57. Harrison, R. (2013) Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: late modern heritage practices, sustainability and the ‘crisis’ of accumulation of the past, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19 (6), 579–95. Haynes, J. (2016) The Archivist Who Came in from the Cold: the changing value of archival experience, paper given at ‘The Experience of the Archive’, The Gerald Aylmer Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, April 2016. Holtorf, C. (2015) Averting Loss Aversion in Cultural Heritage, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21 (4), 405–21.

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Jardine, L. (2015) Temptation in the Archives: essays in Golden Age Dutch culture, UCL Press. Ketelaar, E. (2008) Archives as Spaces of Memory, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 29 (1), 9–27. Levine, P. (ed.) (2004) Gender and Empire, Oxford University Press. Longair, S. (2015) Cultures of Curating: the limits of authority, Museum History Journal, 8 (1), 1–7. Monteith, P. (2010) Can Records Speak for Themselves?, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 31 (2), 119–33. Morgan, P. D. and Hawkins, S. (2004) Black Experience and the Empire, Oxford University Press. Morris, B. (2014) In Defence of Oblivion: the case of Dunwich, Suffolk, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (2), 196–216. Nakata, M. (2012) Indigenous Memory, Forgetting and the Archives, Archives and Manuscripts, 40 (2), 98–105. Pietrobruno, S. (2014) Between Narratives and Lists: performing digital intangible heritage through global media, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (7–8), 742–59. Savolainen, R. (1995) Everyday Life Information Seeking: approaching information seeking in the context of ‘way of life’, Library and Information Science Research, 17, 259–94. Sciolino, E. (1986) 7 years after Embassy seizure, Iran still prints US secrets, New York Times, 10 July, www.nytimes.com/1986/07/10/world/7-years-afterembassy-seizure-iran-still-prints-us-secrets.html Steedman, C. (2001) Dust, Manchester University Press. Van der Merwe, R. (2015) Collections Create Connections: stitching the lives of marginalised women on the national memory canvas, Museum Management and Curatorship, 30 (4), 268–82.

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CHAPTER 5 Imagining archives David Thomas

Introduction How have researchers responded to the absence or inaccessibility of archives? This chapter describes a range of possible responses. Some have simply imagined the missing records, while others have gone further and fictionalized them, producing novelistic accounts or even virtual-reality versions of what might have existed. Writers on the slave trade who suffer from an almost total lack of written sources about individual slaves are well known as users of these approaches. Going far beyond fictionalization, others have forged documents to make up for silences. The most famous example of missing information is that of Shakespeare. Although a great deal is known about the basic facts of his life, scholars and others have been disappointed at the lack of personal and emotional detail and their responses have ranged from a simple and harmless fictionalization – for instance calling a book Shakespeare’s Local – to outright and deliberate forgery. The fact that archives can be imagined, fictionalized, faked or forged tells us something of significance about their meaning and this will be discussed at the end of the chapter.

Imagining archives Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell of UCLA have discussed (2016) what happens when archives are either closed or are absent and where the

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response of individuals or groups of individuals has been to imagine the contents of the unattainable material. They describe the impact of the deaths of the former Khmer Rouge Deputy Prime Minister, Ieng Sary, and former Serbian President, Slobodan Milosevic, during the course of their trials for crimes against humanity and war crimes. In the absence of trials and, in the case of Ieng Sary, lost testimony, a form of never-actualized record was created in the minds of their victims and possibly a wider public. Such imagined records can never be cross-examined or provide the basis for a conviction. There are a number of cases where the contents of caches of closed records have been imagined and this has led to public pressure for access. For example, concern over the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy and the existence of closed files relating to the event led to the 1992 President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, which mandated that all the records relating to the assassination be housed at the US National Archives and that an independent board be established to review those records that were still closed (Gilliland and Caswell, 2016, 62–3). However, certain records still remain locked away, leading to continued speculation and conspiracy theories. In some cases, the eventual release of closed material which had been believed to contain a great secret was profoundly disappointing because it did not contain the evidence which was imagined. Gilliland and Caswell (2016, 54) quote the example of a cache of letters from Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta which were believed to contain evidence that the two were lovers. When they were opened, the letters turned out to contain no trace of an affair. The case of records which do not exist is different from ones which are merely closed. In some instances and for a variety of reasons, people have imagined, or fictionalized, the existence of non-existent records. Victims of state oppression in Morocco have imagined the existence of a vast state archive which contains their books, tracts, journals, photographs, political posters and more – materials which were confiscated when they were under investigation. Similarly, Aboriginal people in New South Wales were apparently afraid of accessing their records because they had been told by the Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards that the State Records Office contained deeply personal information about their lives. In fact, no such information had been captured and in some cases there were no records at all documenting their contacts with the Board (Gilliland and Caswell, 2016, 63–4).

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The slave trade Perhaps the most heart-breaking absence is the lack of evidence about the lives of men and women being carried from Africa across the Atlantic to live as slaves in America or the Caribbean. Here there are few records of individuals and beyond incidental or brief mentions in formal records, little can be discovered about them. In the absence of factual information, the response of writers has been to fictionalize their lives. The writer Saidiya Hartman said: There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage. This silence in the archive in combination with the robustness of the fort or barracoon, not as a holding cell or space of confinement but as an episteme, has for the most part focused the historiography of the slave trade on quantitative matters and on issues of markets and trade relations. Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive. (Hartman, 2008, 3)

In the end, however, she ‘chose not to tell a story about Venus [a slave who died aboard ship] because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive. History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive’ (Hartman, 2008, 9). Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage provides just such a story – a fictionalized account of a voyage on a slave ship. As Marc Steinberg said in his review of the novel: History too is a tenuous notion, perhaps especially for those historically disenfranchised. Johnson, like several other contemporary African American writers – Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sherley Anne Williams, Ishmael Reed – explicitly or implicitly attempts to inscribe some form of historical retelling; these writers do so, of course, primarily to reveal, not conceal, truth about nineteenth-century America. But inscribing possibility, and not recorded ‘fact’, is questionable business to some who might accept written document as doctrine. Regardless, these writers do not create history; they re-create historical possibility, plausible scenarios omitted from historical documentation. (Steinberg, 2003, 385)

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In doing this, Johnson casts doubt on the authenticity of the authentic records of the slave trade. To quote Steinberg (2003, 379) again: ‘Rutherford labels Falcon’s log a “rough” log . . . the one a ship’s master edited to produce a more polished book for his employers’. Logs are, in part, inherently lies; they are meant to appease overseers, much like the original slave narratives, which were often overseen by abolitionist interests. Some writers from former colonies have to deal with the fact that the creation of history is virtually impossible because documents and testimonies and traces have been systematically erased and purposely deleted. Their response has been to produce fictionalized histories. The Guyanese writer Janice Shinebourne, produces autobiographical fiction which focuses on women, ordinary and poor people, ‘unhistoric acts’ and daily lives (Bragard, 2001, 13). The Mauritian poet Khal Torabully, who writes about the experiences of indentured labour from India, has talked about the significance of remembering Indian values and rituals as ‘compensation for the lack of archives’ (Bragard, 2001, 21). While reviewing Dionne Brand’s book, A Map to the Door of No Return, Erica L. Johnson (2014, 156–7) describes how Brand (who was born in Trinidad) and other writers from similar backgrounds create what she calls a neo-archive. This she defines as ‘fiction that creates history in the face of its absence’. She explains that ‘unlike historians, writers of fiction can fully enter the conditional tense . . . and what is more, they can merge the conditional with the present through poetic explorations of archival gaps’. Brand’s novel thus ‘engages, revises, and imagines a particular piece of history into presence’.

Imagined re-creations Some writers have gone even further, imagining entire books which never existed or even recreating destroyed villages. In the period 1992 to 1995, a number of Bosnian villages were destroyed by Serbian forces. Hariz Halilovich of RMIT University described (2014) how the survivors, often now living in exile, have responded by reimagining and reimaging their villages in cyberspace. The village of Zepa was destroyed and many of the survivors moved to the USA. They have now recreated Zepa as a vibrant virtual village, but also as an online archive, museum and shrine to the lost, containing photographs, names, nicknames and

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other information about the deceased, accounts of activities by the attackers, etc. A similar process of imagination to compensate for the absence of the actual can be seen in the strange case of the Necronomicon. This book of magic is one of a number of books invented by the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1938). The book (referred to as dreaded, abhorred or forbidden) was allegedly written by a half-crazed Yemeni Arab, Abdul Alhazred. Over a number of his stories, Lovecraft built up a comprehensive account of it, including its composition, the mysterious death of its author, and its translation into Greek and Latin, the production of an English version by the astrologer Dr John Dee and its present whereabouts – copies are held in libraries in Buenos Aires, London and Paris, while there are two in Massachusetts: one at Harvard and the other at the imagined Miskatonic University in the fictional Arkham. Since Lovecraft admitted that the book never existed – it was a simple trope – his fans have had to imagine it and to imaginatively recreate it. There have been a number of Necronomicons, including a hoax edition in a language called Duriac (‘Alhazred’, 1973) and another which was allegedly a computer translation of a cipher copy by Dr John Dee (Hay, 1995). But other creators have imagined the work more seriously. The English occultist, Kenneth Grant claimed (1972) that the book exists in astral form and can be accessed by the use of ritual magic. Similarly, believers in UFOs are creating, at the Roswell UFO Museum in New Mexico, an archive of what the community wishes and believes to be the case. Their archive includes testimonials, media coverage and scientific research. David Kim argues that categories of the ‘unknown’ and the ‘unidentified’ in UFOlogy generate affective responses that are expressed as knowledge and perhaps even as evidence when scientifically verifiable evidence is not available (Gilliland and Caswell, 2016, 64).

Forging archives Archives have been the victims of forgeries on numerous occasions. In many cases, these were done simply to make money. The forger John Drewe added false papers to the Tate Galley archive to ‘authenticate’ forged paintings he was trying to sell. Similarly, Mark Hofmann created and sold the ‘original manuscript’ of a Daniel Boone letter known only from a printed edition. Hofmann was the greatest (currently recognized) archive forger of the 20th century. Many of his creations were centred on the Mormon faith. At

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the heart of the Mormon faith is the Book of Mormon, a translation of a book of gold plates revealed by the Angel Moroni to Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church. One of the earliest works of anti-Mormon propaganda, Mormonism Unveiled (1834), criticized Smith for being involved in folk magic and using magical methods to search for buried treasure. Indeed, Smith had been prosecuted in 1826 for scrying (using a crystal ball or similar object to discover hidden knowledge), then an offence under the New York penal code. Hofmann forged documents confirming the allegations, including a letter from Joseph Smith to Joseph Stowell with instructions for using a split hazel rod to find treasure. Worse was the notorious Salamander letter, in which a white salamander and not the Angel Moroni showed Smith the gold plates. Salamanders are traditionally associated with folk magic (Thomas, 2009, 23). Hofmann’s motives are complex. He was born a Mormon, but claimed to have lost his faith. He certainly made large sums of money from selling his fakes to collectors. At his parole hearing he said ‘As far back as I can remember, I have liked to impress people through my deceptions. In fact, some of my earliest memories are of doing magic and card tricks. Fooling people gave me a sense of power and superiority. I believe this is what led to my forging activities’ (Sillitoe and Roberts, 1988). This motivation was best described 300 years ago by the great classical scholar and royal librarian Richard Bentley in his exposure of the forged epistles of the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris (c.570–554 BC). He described the motives of a forger as either simple gain or ‘glory and affectation as an exercise of style and an ostentation of wit . . . to speak freely the greatest part of mankind are so easily imposed on in this way, that there is too great an invitation to put the trick on them’ (Barker, 1990, 23). Simple gain and ostentation of wit seem to have explained the behaviour of Mark Hofmann and some other document forgers, but others seem to have had other motives. The motives of the individuals responsible for the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which described a Jewish and Masonic conspiracy to achieve world domination, are not hard to guess (Michelis, 2004).

Imagining Shakespeare The life of Shakespeare is the most fertile source for fictionalization and the creation of imaginary archives, ranging from the harmless elaboration

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of a few stories to deliberate forgery. Unlike other archive forgers who were motivated by money, politics or a desire to demonstrate how clever they were, those who fictionalized and forged Shakespeare’s life were motivated by a desire to fill in the many silences. There is a considerable amount of information about Shakespeare as a Tudor gentleman, taxpayer, actor, investor in theatres and, most obviously, playwright. We know where he was born, where he lived, what property he owned, who his friends and family were and we can trace the trajectory of his career as he rose from the son of an indebted Stratford tradesman to a wealthy property owner, but we have no knowledge of his thoughts, loves, aspirations and regrets. Even information about the basic facts of his existence are scarce: we do not know precisely when he was born; and both portraits accepted as being genuine are posthumous. The records of his early life are almost non-existent; there are records of his baptism in 1564, his licence to marry in 1582, the baptism of his daughter Susanna in 1583 and that of the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in 1585. Then, suddenly, in 1592 he is subject to a published attack by the playwright Robert Greene as an ‘upstart crow’ and one who ‘supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you’. Greene refers to his ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’, a clear link to Henry VI Part 3, ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. Clearly Shakespeare had arrived. But where had he been? There is nothing known about his activities between the baptisms of his children in 1585 and his appearance in the world of the London theatres in 1592. This period has been fetishized as ‘Shakespeare’s Lost Years’, although E. A. J. Honigmann said that given the almost total lack of evidence for his life, the whole period from 1564 to 1592 should be regarded as lost (Honigmann, 1998, 1). Essentially, the problem is that Shakespeare did not leave an archive for successive generations. All the surviving documents relating to Shakespeare are highly formal, mostly legal records. It is not even clear that he had a coherent collection of his own works. In the introduction to the 1623 First Folio edition of his plays and poems, his friends Henry Condell and John Heminge, the editors, talked about ‘collecting’ and ‘gathering’ his texts. Even if he had an archive, who would have cared for it? His direct descendants had died out by 1670, although the descendants of his sister Joan continued to live in Stratford until the 19th century. None of the early researchers into his life mentions a collection of papers.

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A recent blog from George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film and entitled ‘What Does Identity Mean?’ (www.eastman.org/what-does-identity-mean) discusses the consequences of captions and titles to interpretation in photographs, and comments that: ‘it is also human nature to want to look behind the curtain, to know the narrative behind the iconic image’. Shakespeare is undeniably an icon and this sentiment is particularly true in relation to his life. Scholars were deeply disappointed by the lack of real personal information about Shakespeare and, at an early date, identified a serious failure in the archive. This evidence of dissatisfaction with the ‘real’ record resulted generally, not with an acceptance that the details of the lives of most people in history are unknowable, but instead in speculation and exaggeration. The response of biographers was to ‘create’ multiple Shakespeares to suit the demands of the time and of the ‘creator’. Perhaps the earliest statement about the failure of the archive comes from Joseph Greene, Master of Stratford on Avon Grammar School. In 1747, he discovered a transcript of Shakespeare’s will – the first time the document was known to scholars. He wrote about his discovery to James West, Secretary to the Treasury: The legacies and bequests therein are undoubtedly as he intended, but the manner of introducing them appears to me so dull and irregular, so absolutely void of the least particle of that spirit which animated our great poet that it must lessen his character as a writer to imagine the least sentence of it is his production. The only satisfaction I receive in reading it is to know who were his relations and what he left them. (Schoenbaum, 1970, 138)

The first approach to finding the truth about Shakespeare’s life was taken by researchers in the 17th century, some of whom travelled to Stratford and recorded the memories of old people living there. Others, like the antiquarian and biographer John Aubrey, interviewed people in London with Shakespeare connections – there was Joseph Howe, who claimed to know the model for Dogberry, and William Beeston of Hog Lane, Shoreditch, who was a member of an acting family (Schoenbaum, 1970, 129). There was also Sir William Davenant, the poet and playwright; according to Aubrey, he was happy to claim that he was Shakespeare’s son – apparently, Shakespeare would occasionally stop at the Taverne in Oxford

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which was owned by Davenant’s parents. Sadly, Davenant’s nose was much disfigured by mercury treatment for syphilis which, as one 17th-century researcher remarked, makes it hard to see any resemblance between the portraits of the two men (Schoenbaum, 1975, 164–6). This pioneering period marks the beginning of what might be called the imaginal world of Shakespeare and the creation of multiple versions of his life. The most famous story about Shakespeare’s early life is that he had to leave Stratford because he had been involved in deer poaching on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy and had written a rude poem about Lucy. Although the archives are silent about this incident, there are several sources for it – poet and Shakespeare scholar Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 Life of Shakespeare and the Reverend Richard Davies, Vicar of Sapperton in Gloucestershire, who had inherited some notes on the lives of poets from the Reverend William Fulman of Corpus Christi, Oxford. It is sometimes claimed that in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare got his revenge on Lucy by portraying him as Justice Shallow. Lucy’s coat of arms contained images of luces or pike, but Shallow and his relative Slender interpret these as louses. Modern scholars have tended to disregard this story, for which there is little evidence; Lucy did not own a deer park and seems to have been a benevolent man (Schoenbaum, 1970, 108–14). We can see the very beginning of multiple Shakespeares with the stories about how he started off in life. Nicholas Rowe claimed that he had worked in his father’s wool dealing business, while, according to John Aubrey, he followed his father into the butchering business and ‘when he kill’d a Calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a Speech’. But Shakespeare the butcher was hardly acceptable to the academy, and so other scholars seized on the story, also by Aubrey, that he worked as a country schoolmaster (Honigmann, 1998, 2). There is some archival evidence to support this – in 1581, Alexander Hoghton of Lea in Lancashire wrote his will in which he left his stock of play cloths and musical instruments to his brother or to Sir Thomas Hesketh if his brother did not intend to keep players. He required Hesketh to be friendly unto Fulk Gyllome and William Shakeshafte who were dwelling with him and to either take them into his service or help them find a good master (Honigmann, 1998, 3). There are some other pieces of the jigsaw which might pin this down. A man called John Cottam from Lancashire was a schoolmaster in Stratford until late 1581 or early 1582 and left soon after his brother, a Catholic priest, was

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arrested. Cottam had close links with the Hoghton family and may have introduced Shakespeare to them. The theory also sort of fits into the chronology of Shakespeare’s life. We don’t know where he was in 1581 but we know he was back in Stratford marrying Anne Hathaway in 1582 (Honigmann, 1998, 4–29). In 1599, John Weever continued the Lancashire connection when he wrote an epigram to William Shakespeare; his collection of epigrams was dedicated to Sir Richard Hoghton, a relative of Alexander (Honigmann, 1998, 48). But there is no other real evidence and doubters have argued that ‘players’ in that period normally meant musicians and not actors. It was not uncommon for wealthy people to have musicians on their staff. For example, Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave Hall in Suffolk had a group of musicians led by the composer John Wilbye; when he died he left enough musical instruments for a small orchestra (Mason, 1958, 5). However, it was not usual for gentry to keep troupes of actors. In addition, scholars have claimed that the name Shakeshaft is common in that part of the country (Honigmann, 1998, 15). There is a short journey between elaborating on old tales from Stratford to making things up – the creation of alternative lives based on what ‘must have happened’. Take the example of Shakespeare in Italy. Shakespeare set six plays in Italy and so, clearly, he must have spent many of the lost years travelling to that country, mustn’t he? The archive is silent on Shakespeare’s travel to the Mediterranean. Despite this, in 2011, lawyer and Shakespeare scholar Richard Paul Roe (1922–2010) published a detailed guide to Shakespeare’s travels in Italy – well maybe not Shakespeare’s travels, because Roe is not certain who actually wrote the plays. The trouble with this work is, as one of the people who commented on it on Amazon said, ‘the author’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare is admirable but the appalling lack of scholarly rigour used to produce this book is jaw-dropping at virtually every turn of the page’ (Davies, 2013). People who doubt that Shakespeare visited Italy point out references to the tides in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (the Mediterranean is not tidal) and suggest that Shakespeare could easily have learned about Italy while in London – there was a restaurant run by an Italian in the parish of St Olave Hart Street, there were Italian scholars and musicians in London and even a pub, The Oliphant (or Elephant) on Bankside which catered for Italians (Schoenbaum, 1975, 127). As we will see, the biographers of Shakespeare have also had to create their own imaginal realm to deal with the poverty of information about

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the greatest of writers. Let us begin with the story of Shakespeare’s favourite pub. In 2012, Pete Brown, a writer on beer, produced a book called Shakespeare’s Local. This was not a history of The Oliphant, but of The George, which is situated in Borough High Street, south of the River Thames and is London’s last surviving galleried coaching inn. The blurb for the book on Amazon.co.uk said that ‘It’s fair to say that Shakespeare will have popped in from the nearby Globe for a pint’. The back cover says that regulars included Chaucer, Dickens and, quite possibly even Shakespeare himself. Given this speculation, it is worth exploring what evidence there might be that Shakespeare, or indeed anybody else, popped into a pub for a pint of beer. In the days before mobile phones and selfies, there are four possibilities. First that the person concerned got into trouble over something that happened in the pub – as is well known, Christopher Marlowe was killed in a quarrel over the bill at an establishment in Deptford – Shakespeare wasn’t. The visit to the pub may have mentioned the visit in a diary – no Shakespearian diary survives. They may have written a letter from the pub or received one there – we are slightly closer here. Richard Quiney wrote a letter to Shakespeare from a London pub – but it was The Bell in Carter Lane and not The George (Schoenbaum, 1975, 180). As a playwright, Shakespeare may have mentioned his ‘local’ in one of his works. In fact, he mentions two pubs close to The George – The White Hart in Borough High Street which he gives as the headquarters of Jack Cade’s rebellion in Henry VI Part 2, and more interestingly, The Elephant, which was located near to what is now the south end of Southwark Bridge. In Twelfth Night, he says ‘In the South Suburbs, at the Elephant is best to lodge; I will bespeak our diet’. A rare example of Tudor product placement. What the blurb does not say is that The George is not particularly close to the Globe – there were many other pubs which were much nearer. The Cardinal’s Hat pub in Cardinal’s Cap Alley was next to the current Globe theatre and is about 200 metres from the original Globe. It is known to have been used by people from the theatre – Edward Alleyn the actor dined there in 1617, while John Taylor, the Water Poet, also had a meal there with some actors (Survey of London, 1950, 52). In fact there is no evidence for Brown’s claim and if you read to page 143 of his book, you will find that he confesses that ‘there are no records at all of what pubs Shakespeare went to, or what he did while he was there. And that obviously means there are no records of Shakespeare ever having visited the George Inn. Sorry.’

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One stage beyond making up stories because they ‘must have happened’ is to forge evidence. Some of this was pretty harmless stuff. In about 1785, John Byng, a retired soldier and diarist, visited the Birthplace in Stratford and was shown round by Mrs Hart. Mrs Hart was very poor and Byng offered to buy the crossbar from ‘Shakespeare’s chair’ which was on display. Mrs Hart refused to sell, but having left Byng to walk around the town for a few hours she eventually relented and Byng left, highly delighted with his purchase (Byng, 1934, 224–6). We are not told Mrs Hart’s feelings but I think we can make an educated guess. One of the first to make a serious effort to forge documents was WilliamHenry Ireland (1775–1835), the illegitimate son of his father’s housekeeper. William-Henry got his first taste of the mania for Shakespeare relics when he visited Stratford with his father, who bought ‘Shakespeare’s courting chair’ from Hewland’s Farm (now called Anne Hathaway’s Cottage) as well as a goblet and other trinkets carved from Shakespeare’s mulberry tree. Ireland’s father, the publisher Samuel Ireland, was a close friend of John Byng, owner of the crossbar from Shakespeare’s chair and an enthusiast for the life of the Bard of Avon. With such a start in life, it is hardly surprising that Ireland turned to forgery, creating Shakespeare manuscripts and plays, largely to win the goodwill of his father, who regarded him with indifference. He was fascinated by Thomas Chatterton, the 18th-century forger of medieval material, and almost certainly knew the works of James Macpherson, whose Ossian ballads had been exposed as forgeries by Dr Johnson and others. William-Henry Ireland first told his father that during a dinner with Mr Mitchell, the banker, he had met a wealthy gentleman who had many old papers which had been in his family for a century and a half, and which might be of interest to the young William-Henry. Ireland had then visited the wealthy gentleman’s chambers and was shown a chest containing many old manuscripts, in which he found the Shakespeare material. Later he began referring to the man as Mr H. and to claim that he had further treasures at his country house. Eventually, William-Henry’s father Samuel wrote a series of letters to ‘Mr H.’ and a bizarre situation developed in which Samuel was writing letters to the fictitious gentleman and William-Henry was replying. William-Henry Ireland provided a whole range of exciting Shakespeare documents, including letters to Anne Hathaway and Elizabeth I, as well as original manuscripts of Hamlet and King Lear. Many people were fooled; his most famous victim was James

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Boswell, the biographer of Dr Johnson. In 1795 he stood in front of the ‘original’ manuscript of King Lear, knelt down on the floor and kissed it and said ‘I shall now die contented since I have lived to see this present day’. Ireland’s downfall was dramatic; the first production of his new ‘Shakespeare’ play Vortigern and Rowena was booed off the stage, two days after Edmund Malone, the greatest Shakespeare scholar of the age, had published a 400-page exposé of Ireland’s earlier forged manuscripts (Schoenbaum, 1970, 191–233). The most significant Shakespeare forger was John Payne Collier (1789– 1883). He was a serious scholar who had no need to be a forger, since he had made some genuine discoveries. Had he stuck to legitimate scholarship, Collier would have found a place in the canon of Shakespearian scholars as a hero, not a villain. Sadly, from his earliest major work, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, he invented new documents or amended existing ones. His most elaborate forgery was the so-called Perkins Folio, a Second Folio of Shakespeare, which had been heavily annotated by an ‘Old Corrector’. The annotations included changes to spellings, the omission of parts of scenes and stage directions. By creating the Perkins Folio, Collier had gone too far and scholars began to raise doubts about the authenticity of the annotations. One, A. E. Brae, accused Collier of forgery in a pamphlet published in 1853. Collier sued Brae’s publisher for libel and won the day. But cracks were beginning to appear in Collier’s façade. He worked as part-time librarian to the Duke of Devonshire and had given the Duke the Perkins folio. The only way in which scholars could have accessed the volume was by applying to the Duke for permission and they would have had to view it under the daunting eye of Collier. However, in 1858, the old Duke died and his cousin the seventh Duke decided to allow the manuscript to be inspected by Sir Frederic Madden of the British Museum. At which point, Collier’s game was up. Madden noticed pencil annotations in the margins and observed that the annotations in ink were written over pencil markings. Crucially, he recognized that the annotations were in Collier’s handwriting. H. N. Maskelyne, Keeper of the Mineral Department of the Museum, conducted tests which showed that the ink annotations were written over the pencil markings and that the ink was, in fact, a watercolour paint, presumably chosen for its pseudo-antique lustre. Within three years, other scholars published further information about Collier’s forgeries and his reputation was destroyed (Schoenbaum, 1981). In 1982,

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there was an attempt to defend Collier by Dewey Ganzel, a professor from Oberlin College, Ohio. Ganzel argued (1982) that the criticisms of Collier were led by upper-class dilettantes such as Frederic Madden who resented the success of the hard-working, lower-class Collier. Ganzel made the point that not all of the accusations of forgery against Collier have stood up to critical examination, as we will see when we consider the Revels Accounts (below). However, most scholars believe that Collier’s guilt is established. Schoenbaum (1970, 332–61) gave details of an attempt by Collier to launch another campaign of forgery nearly 20 years after he had been unmasked as the Shakespeare forger. This time it was a Milton folio annotated in Milton’s handwriting. The folio can be seen at the New York Public Library – the annotations are not by Milton. This was not referenced by Ganzel. Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman are the great scholars of Collier; their study of his life and forgeries fills two thick volumes (2004). They point out that ‘the fabrication or forgery of citations and sources, alternative readings with a bogus cachet, old provenance, reports of “lost” texts and the like . . . can be far more difficult to identify than large-scale imposture, and more likely to persist to corrupt and distort. Cumulatively, its effects may be devastating’ (Freeman and Freeman, 2004, 179). The Collier story is interesting, but what are the forgeries evidence of? If current postmodernist-influenced archival theory now veers towards viewing ‘genuine’ archives as a creation, what is the status of these forged archives? Does postmodernism have to accept that there is some level at which evidence matches more closely to reality? Or should it simply focus on the fact that these archives are still evidence of something: if so, of what? While the forgeries are not evidence of Shakespeare’s life, they do have some evidential value. First, they tell us something about the psychology of the two forgers. Ireland was desperate to win the affection of his father who was a dilettante collector of Shakespeare relics and so his forgeries are the sort of thing which would have appealed to such a man. His focus was on the dramatic and romantic – the original manuscript of Hamlet, say, or material about Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Collier was much more concerned with his scholarly reputation and so his forgeries were much less like collectors’ items and more concerned with matters of interest to scholars – petitions about the Blackfriars Theatre or stage directions in the plays. More importantly, they tell us something significant about the ‘authenticity’ of archives. Until Collier was unmasked, his forgeries were

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accepted as genuine records. Suddenly, not only were some of his documents forgeries, but all the documents which he had published or referenced were suspected by scholars. The biography of Collier in the original Dictionary of National Biography (1887) said that ‘None of his statements or quotations can be trusted without verifying and no volume or document that has passed through his hands . . . can be too carefully scrutinised’. Even genuine manuscripts were doubted. Between 1945 and 1958, Sydney Race of Leicester contributed 36 articles to Notes and Queries identifying hitherto unsuspected forgeries and fabrications and accusing Collier of concocting them. In many cases, Race condemned manuscripts without consulting the originals and most of his allegations proved to be without substance when examined (Freeman and Freeman, 2004, 210–11). In some cases, he claimed as forgeries documents which were known before Collier published them. For example, he claimed that Simon Forman’s Bocke of Plaies was fake, although most scholars accept that it is genuine and had been discovered by W. H. Black while cataloguing the Ashmole Manuscripts. More notoriously, the Revels Accounts, which had been discovered by Peter Cunningham, a scholar and antiquarian working in the Audit Office at Somerset House, were regarded as forgeries for over 40 years after their discovery in 1868, largely because their discoverer was an associate of Collier. Every single major scholar of that period felt they were forged. These documents are significant records of the performances at the royal court by leading theatrical companies, including the King’s Men (Shakespeare’s troupe) and they provided new evidence about the dating of several plays, notably Othello and The Tempest. They were not rehabilitated until further research was carried out by the barrister Ernest Law and A. E. Stamp of the Public Record Office in 1911 (Thomas, 2009, 30–2). But this too is really about creation. In this case, the opposite: the creation not of false evidence, where no true existed, but an assumption of false evidence that was indeed true. In other words, the ‘creation’ of falseness where no falseness existed. At present, the debate about the authenticity of archives seems to involve two possible positions – traditional historians who see archives as neutral sites of knowledge and others who see them as political institutions where what survives reflects the existing power structure. However, the history of the Shakespeare forgeries tells us that documents can be accepted as authentic at one minute and be reviled

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as forgeries the next, while others can make a circular journey from authentic to reviled and back to respectable. The discovery of forgeries is rather like wandering into an archival hall of mirrors – it is hard to tell which is the genuine reflection of the past. While we have read the scholarly work of Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman and are confident that we can tell a genuine Collier from a genuine Shakespeare document, people in the 1850s and 1950s were no less confident. In this sense, the postmodernists are indeed right: all is about what is believed. A ‘genuine archive’ is just what it is believed to be, a concept here shown to be vulnerable to fantasy, forgery and falsity.

Further into the hall of mirrors We can go two steps further into the hall of mirrors. Our first step takes us to mirrors which reflect two totally different views of reality. Geoffrey Yeo (2010) quotes sociologist Peter Eglin, who gave the example of two reports of a disturbance that occurred in Berkeley in 1968. A radical professor stated that there was a ‘fracas . . . organized by the police in an obvious attempt to provoke the people’. On the other hand, the mayor stated that the protesters abused and attacked the police and interfered with their duties. Perhaps this should not surprise us as it is an example of two opposing views of the same event, but go further into the hall and we move from documents which were deliberately forged or contradictory to ones which exist in both a genuine and a falsified state at the same time. On Saturday April 15th 1989 a fatal crush occurred on the terraces of the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, UK, during a soccer match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Ninety-six Liverpool fans died and hundreds more were injured. It was the worst disaster in British sporting history, and the tragedy became known simply as Hillsborough. At the time, there was much criticism in the press of the alleged behaviour of Liverpool fans who were accused of drunkenness and hooliganism. The subsequent 23 years saw a number of inquiries, criminal investigations and civil litigation which left many bereaved families and survivors believing that the true context, circumstances and aftermath of Hillsborough had not been properly investigated. They were also profoundly concerned that following unsubstantiated allegations made by senior police officers and politicians and reported in the press, it had become widely assumed that

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the Liverpool fans’ behaviour had contributed to, if not caused, the disaster. It was only in 2012 with the publication of the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel that the truth was finally established – the fans were not to blame for the tragedy and false information had been fed to the press by police officers and others. Immediately following the disaster, an independent inquiry was set up under Lord Justice Taylor. The South Yorkshire Police began preparing for the inquiry by asking all senior officers who had been present at the ground and all junior officers who had been at the end of the ground where the disaster took place to record their recollection of the events. Normal police practice would have been for officers to record what happened in their pocket books, but in this case, the South Yorkshire Police instructed officers to write separate notes of their recollections, in the form of a statement, including matters of comment and impression. However, the South Yorkshire Police subsequently became concerned about the evidential value of such statements, since comments and impressions do not count as legal evidence. They were also concerned that comments which were critical of other police officers might be forwarded to the Taylor Inquiry and accepted by the Inquiry without the officer making the criticisms being crossexamined. So, the decision was taken to edit the statements to remove comments and opinions. The editing was done by the police authority in conjunction with their legal representatives. The Taylor Inquiry was aware that edited versions of the original statements were being submitted as evidence, but raised no objection. The alteration of evidence became more widely known when Lord Justice Stuart-Smith conducted a review of the evidence of the tragedy in 1998. He interviewed the then Chief Constable of South Yorkshire and remarked that ‘there was a tendency to remove opinion and intemperate language about senior police officers but leave in similar material about misbehaviour by Liverpool fans’. However, it was only with the work of the Hillsborough Independent Panel which was set up in 2009 to identify and publish all the evidence relating to Hillsborough that the scale of the alterations of evidence began to come to light. The panel discovered 164 statements which had amendments of substance. Some 116 of these removed or altered comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire Police. These included 41 statements in which alterations downplayed or removed criticisms made by officers of their leadership and of the police response to the disaster. In particular,

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suggestions that senior officers had lost control of events, or that they were ill-equipped to respond to the unfolding tragedy, were firmly squashed (Hillsborough Independent Panel, 2012, s.2.11.56). For example, the original statement by Police Constable John Thomas Hood (1989) stated that ‘Sergeants and Inspectors appeared to be aimlessly milling about and direct radio control appeared to be lost. There did not appear to be any leadership.’ This was removed from the final version of his statement. The handwritten statement by Police Constable Alan Thomas Wadsworth (1989) contains a statement that ‘There was no leadership at the Leppings Lane end following the disaster, either in person or on the radio’. This was neatly crossed through and the words do not appear in the typewritten version of Constable Wadsworth’s statement. Since the publication of the Panel’s report, further, new evidence of falsification has been coming to light – in 2013, the Independent Police Complaints Commission announced it had found a further 55 officers whose statements appeared to have been amended.1 The Commission is conducting a criminal investigation into the tragedy, including the amendments to police accounts, and prosecutions may possibly follow. The police, perhaps unadvisedly from their point of view, kept both the original statements and the doctored versions, so now we have a situation in which two copies of ‘original’ records exist – one copy recording what junior police officers said and another copy recording what their superiors thought they should have said. Two mirrors reflecting different images of the past.

Complete fictions Sometimes fiction writers imagine the use of archival documents to add a touch of verisimilitude to their stories. A few are so good at their trade that they manage to convince their readers of the truth of the events they have described. The now almost forgotten British thriller writer James Leasor cleverly combined fact and fiction in a number of books published in the 1970s and 1980s. They include X-Troop (1982), which purports to tell the tale of Stephen Rigby, a Jewish refugee Commando, who is parachuted into France in May 1944 acting as a German agent, and is taken to meet Hitler at Berchtesgarten to confirm that the Allies will be landing at the Pas-de-Calais rather than in Normandy. Some of the book at least was based

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on fact: Leasor even includes a list of files at The National Archives he had consulted in writing the book (Leasor, 1982, 287). In Operation FORTITUDE, the Allies mounted a detailed and effective plan to deceive the Germans as to where the landings would take place. But sending a British soldier to convince Hitler was not part of it. It does not take much digging in the archives to prove the whole book was a cunningly contrived fake. However, the mixture of fact and fiction still convinces some people even today that it was true. In his short story ‘The Hertford Manuscript’, which appears in The Custodians and Other Stories (1976), Richard Cowper tells the story of a search for a 19th-century time traveller – Robert Pensley – who finds himself marooned in Restoration London. He describes how he tries to find evidence of Pensley in various libraries and archives in London: ‘in an attempt to verify what I already felt to be true, namely that, in some wholly inexplicable manner Robert Pensley had succeeded in transferring himself backwards in time to the 17th Century and had there perished’. Simon Fowler was contacted by a researcher wanting to know more about Pensley and other time travellers who were supposed to have lived at 12 Petersham Road, Richmond in the 1890s. Sadly, a careful check of the electoral registers and other records at the local studies library proved that neither Pensley nor the other gentlemen existed. Even so there was a slight thrill – what if there was really some truth in all this?

What does forgery tell us about archives? So how does archival theory intersect with all this? The intersection brings us back full circle to the most basic of archival tenets: trust, authenticity and provenance. However, it also adds strong weight to the arguments by postmodernists that evidence is a process. Terry Cook (2001) talked of a shift from ‘product to process, from structure to function, from archives to archiving, from records to contexts of recording, from “natural” residues or passive by-products of administrative activity to a consciously constructed and actively mediated “archivalisation” of social memory’. But there are other issues too. Derrida has written that ‘alongside that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes [it] to destruction . . . The archive always works, and a priori, against itself’ (Derrida, 1995, 14). This is certainly true

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physically. Archival materials of paper and parchment decay invisibly and visibly, collapsing over time in a process that can be delayed but not stopped; photocopies in files fade and will become illegible. Conceptually, too, this entropy highlights the shifting nature of evidence, fact, truth and proof; and how, in reality, these concepts are all bound to culture and belief. McKemmish, Gilliland-Swetland and Ketelaar (2005) discuss how ‘archival literature increasingly points to the need to develop archival systems that can represent multiple recordkeeping realities, encompassing or at least accommodating the differing and temporally-bound world views of all those involved in the activities the records document, and providing meaningful access paths to all stakeholders’. Had the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report been available, they might have pointed to the differing world views of the junior police officers and their seniors as reflected in the unedited and edited statements produced after the tragedy. The authors emphasize the importance of storytelling, which would very much fit in with our forgers and fantasists. They also describe how ‘the notion that the archives are themselves fixed and immutable relics, artefacts of the past, is under challenge’, and how some knowledge systems function solely when the records (of whatever form) are being used, i.e. they are subject to constant shift and change. All this seems to offer our falsifiers a welcome. These archival writings challenge the very idea of ‘false’ interpretation and there is a positive thrust towards changing the frame of reference from an archival dichotomy (of right/wrong) to one of multiple interpretations containing evidence for different narratives.

Conclusion The existence of forged, falsified or imagined archives provides researchers with insights into the motives and wishes of their creators. A few of the creations were harmless spoofs – nobody would be fooled by the imaginative creations of the Necronomicon, would they? Others, such as some of the Mormon letters forged by Hofmann, seem to have been done to demonstrate their creator’s cleverness. Others were deliberate and selfserving forgeries for financial or other reasons – Mark Hofmann may have been unhappy with the Mormon church, but he made a vast amount of money from his forgeries. The South Yorkshire Police seemed anxious to

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prevent any criticism by their own officers of their handling of the Hillsborough tragedy. But what comes across above all is the need of the creators for some form of completion. Those who have imagined the lives of slaves or recreated lost villages or created documents concerning the life of William Shakespeare appear to be driven by a desire to fill in the gaps, to complete the missing images in a half-finished portrait. In a sense this represents a failure to recognize that archives inevitably are full of silences and that a complete record is unachievable. But is this really anything new? We only have to look back at Shakespeare’s own plays to see the importance of evidence. So perhaps we should leave the final words to the man himself. As Shakespeare wrote in Othello, (Act III, Scene iii), ‘Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof’. What is Othello ultimately about? Interpretation and misinterpretation. This is: believing is seeing, not seeing is believing. As historians and archivists, it is an example to us all.

Note 1 See www.ipcc.gov.uk/news/ipcc-issues-hillsborough-update-july-2013.

References ‘Alhazred, A.’ (1973) Al Azif: The Necronomicon, Lightning Source Inc. Barker, N. (1990) Textual Forgery. In Jones, M., Fake? The art of deception, British Museum Press, 22–7. Bragard, V. (2001) Coolie Woman Fictionalizing Political History: Janice Shinebourne’s memories of violence, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 3 (1), 13–25. Byng, J. (1934) The Torrington Diaries, Eyre and Spottiswode. Cook, T. (2001) Archival Science and Postmodernism: new formulations for old concepts, Archival Science 1, 3–24. Cowper, R. (1976) The Custodians and Other Stories, Gollancz. Davies, N. (2013) review of Roe (2011) on Amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.co.uk/Shakespeare-Guide-Italy-RetracingTravels/dp/0062074261/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1457805975&sr=8-1& keywords=richard+paul+roe. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: a Freudian impression, Diacritics, 25 (2), 9–63.

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Freeman, A. and Freeman, J. I. (2004) John Payne Collier: scholarship and forgery in the nineteenth century, 2 vols, Yale University Press. Ganzel, D. (1982) Fortune and Men’s Eyes: the career of John Payne Collier, Oxford University Press. Gilliland, A. J. and Caswell, M. (2016) Records and Their Imaginaries: imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined, Archival Science, 16, 53–75. Grant, K. (1972) The Magical Revival, Muller. Halilovich, H. (2014) Reclaiming Erased Lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora, Archival Science, 14 (3–4), 231–47. Hartman, S. (2008) Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe, 12 (2), 1–14. Hay, G. (1995) The Necronomicon: the Book of Dead Names, Skoob Esoterica. Hillsborough Independent Panel (2012) Report, Part 2 chapter 11, http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/report/main-section/part-2/ chapter-11/page-1/. Honigmann, E. A. J. (1998) Shakespeare: the ‘lost years’, Manchester University Press. Hood, J. T. (1989) Original statement, http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/ repository/docs/SYP000115000001.pdf; redacted statement, http:// hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/docs/SYP000081530001.pdf. Johnson, E. L. (2014) Building the Neo-Archive: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, Meridians, 12 (1), 149–71. Leasor, J. (1982) X-Troop, Corgi. Lovecraft, H. P. (1938) History of the Necronomicon, The Rebel Press. Mason, D. E. (1958) Music in Shakespeare’s England, Folger Shakespeare Library. McKemmish, S., Gilliland-Swetland, A. and Ketelaar, E. (2005) Communities of Memory: Pluralising Archival Research and Education Agendas, Archives and Manuscripts, 33 (1), 146–74. Michelis, C. G. de (2004) The Non-Existent Manuscript: a study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, University of Nebraska Press. Roe, R. P. (2011) The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: retracing the Bard’s unknown travels, Harper Perennial. Schoenbaum, S. (1970) Shakespeare’s Lives, Clarendon Press. Schoenbaum, S. (1975) William Shakespeare: a documentary life, Oxford University Press. Schoenbaum, S. (1981) William Shakespeare, Records and Images, Scolar Press. Sillitoe, L. and Roberts, A. D. (1988) Salamander: the story of the Mormon forgery

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murders, Signature Books. Steinberg, M. (2003) Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage: fictionalizing history and historicizing fiction, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 45 (4), 375–90. Survey of London (1950) 20. Bankside (the Parishes of St. Saviour and Christchurch, Southwark). Thomas, D. (2009) Forgery in the Archives, Archives, 34, 21–35. Wadsworth, A. T. (1989) Original statement, http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/SYP000101960001.html; redacted statement, http://hillsborough.independent.gov.uk/repository/SYP000079800001.html. Yeo, G. (2010) Representing the Act: records and speech act theory, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 31 (2), 95–117.

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CHAPTER 6 Solutions to the silence Valerie Johnson

Introduction This book has described a number of factors which have resulted in gaps in the information held by archives: what we have termed silences. This chapter will discuss the role of various actors in the documentary and archival process in filling those gaps, the joint responsibility for change, and possible paths ahead to avoid new gaps appearing in the future.

Is legislation the answer? First to the question of who is responsible for the documentation of society. It has been the implicit argument of this book that we are all responsible, whether as creators of records or professional curators of those papers, or as users, researchers, historians, and informed citizens of societies to whom we have responsibility. Of course, in every state and country, there exists legislation, which lays down legal duties and responsibilities relating to records. But life is about more than legislation, and legislation itself can have unintended consequences. The Freedom of Information Act in the UK was heralded as opening up access to information much sooner than previously, and as a vehicle towards greater government accountability and transparency. However, fears have also been expressed that it is leading creators to avoid writing down information that is subject to the Act or other accountability initiatives, to

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preclude its disclosure (for this view, see, for example, Moss, 2012). Sebina (2009), writing on the implications of the passing of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) in South Africa in 2000, remarked that it has by no means led to full and open access. Fear of taking responsibility for the decision to open, fear of recriminations for one’s own career or simply a general culture of fear can lead to a default to closure. Findlay has hinted of similar issues in Australia: . . . here in Australia, despite much talk of an ‘open government’, the reality for those seeking to extract information under Freedom of Information (FOI) laws can be quite the opposite. Too often, vague references to national security are used to exempt material, part of the longer theme of fear, paranoia and secrecy that has underpinned much public policy since 9/11. (Findlay, 2013, 9)

Challenging silence in the archives: the archivists So can archivists come to the rescue? Many archivists think so – in fact, certainly think they should try. Chris Hurley, for example, has stated that ‘The ultimate role of the archivist in a democratic society is to sustain the evidence which helps that society to know itself’ (Hurley, 2001, 14). But this role takes courage and a need to look afresh at the way archivists work. There are several professional functions which need to be re-examined in the light of the need to prevent future ‘silences’: appraisal, access and cataloguing among them. Addressing the first, Terry Cook, a highly respected archival theorist, has stated directly and fully: How well do we appraise and acquire records? How well have we done so in the past? . . . And who are the ‘we’: the archivists who keep records, or the organizations and institutions and records managers who keep their own official records, or the individuals, communities, and, more broadly, society that keeps its own records? Are these broader organizational and societal entities defined in part, and increasingly over time, in very large part, by what we keep as a record of them? Or for them? Or are we perhaps in turn defined by their needs, wishes, and rights in determining for us what we keep? Or do we enable them to keep their own archives, so that we are virtual keepers, one removed as it were? How well do we integrate conceptually a virtual ‘total archives’ of government and

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major institutional archives with private-sector personal and family archives in ways to complement and supplement each other? Many of these questions have no easy answers, but as a profession we need to think more clearly about these issues and to discern that there is a range of possible answers and an exciting challenge ahead for us, as a profession, to begin testing the answers in our communities. (Cook, 2011, 173–4)

This challenge is one that archivists need to answer if we are truly to document society in its breadth, rather than simply the record of powerful arms of state, organizations and companies. As Cook has stated, ‘Perhaps the more germane pithy assertion about appraisal should rather be: we are what we do not keep, what we consciously exclude, marginalize, ignore, destroy’ (Cook, 2011, 174). Using, interestingly, the metaphor of voices and silence that this book is exploring, he argues that what archivists should be aiming for is: an inter-related ‘whole of society’ or ‘total archive’ landscape . . . [so that] the archivist [can] target realistically the actual records or series of records likely to have greatest potential archival value, in a complementary, holistic integration of the public and private, the centre and the regions, the well-articulated voices and the missing voices. . . . The result should be archives reflecting multiple voices, and not by default only the voices of the powerful, an archival legacy shaped by an appraisal respecting diversity, ambiguity, tolerance, and multiple ways of archival remembering, celebrating difference rather than monoliths, multiple rather than mainstream narratives, the personal and local as much as the corporate and official. (Cook, 2011, 181–2)

And in fact, participatory models of appraisal have been developed (Shilton and Srinivasan, 2007), shining the light on a new and different way forward. Yet in all this talk of society, we must not forget the lone voice: that of the personal archive. The digital age has allowed individuals to document, as never before, tiny daily practices and share them. Historians often lament the lack of sources of the everyday life of ordinary people – now there is a mass of material on the everyday lives of ordinary people, through social media channels such as Facebook (Acker and Brubaker, 2014, 3). Yet, at the turn of the century, Pollard pointed out the absence of personal papers in most appraisal models, and suggested that appraisal methodologies such

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as we have been discussing, which rely on societal context of records and the functions and motivations of their creators, may provide ‘a significant change in the way the appraisal of personal papers can be approached’ to support better these neglected records (Pollard, 2001,147). Appraisal aside, archivists also need to look at what they allow access to, and how. Record offices are often seen as intimidating, with archivists as ‘gatekeepers’ (Johnson, 2007). The very buildings may resonate with echoes of a powerful past. Burton, for example, commented how ‘historians who visit the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC) for the first time are often surprised by how powerfully the archival space itself evokes the Raj,’ with images of ‘oriental despots on the wall giving a feeling of ‘being surveyed by the old colonial state and its minions’ (Burton, 2004, 281). Burton talks about how ‘imperial archives stage – both organizationally and aesthetically – a variety of imperial stories which shape how historians of Empire confront the “archival” evidence they find there’ (Levine, 2004, 282). But importantly, when archives and libraries are sensitive to this context, this kind of physical imagery can be made to work both ways. Equally powerfully, the same institution that houses the India Office records, the British Library, put on a strong and insightful exhibition in 2015, ‘West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song’, relying on written and other narratives from West Africa, in which it worked hard to display, narrate and celebrate voices of West Africans themselves. The museum world has confronted in a very public way its need to challenge the single voice, often a voice associated with what might now be seen as racist and colonialist attitudes (for example, Lynch and Alberti, 2010; Lynch, 2013). Marstine, Bauer and Haines sum up the work of multiple authors proposing a more nuanced view: Virtuality and alternative paradigms of engagement in new media have caused museums to grapple with common assumptions concerning the integrity of the object and have helped to provoke the de-centering of institutional authority (Graham and Cook 2010). Participatory practices and social engagement in the realm of contemporary curating have prompted the museum to redefine itself as a performative space (Goldberg 2001). Repatriation movements have prompted anthropology museums to recognize that the meaning of objects resides not in the physicality of the object itself, but rather in the web of relationships and values that are constituted through practice (Handler 2003). The experiential,

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participatory nature of institutions unencumbered by collections, such as science museums, has introduced new possibilities for community engagement through issues of contemporary concern (Bandelli and Konijn 2011). We present these conversations engaging the tensions between the material and immaterial not as a binary opposition to be reconciled, but as an opportunity to reimagine a more ethical museum that seeks out contestable, multivocal, and open-ended discourse. (Marstine, Bauer and Haines, 2011, 91)

In the archive sector too, many archivists have worked hard and with integrity, passion and professionalism to address these issues. One only has to look at the special issue of Archival Science in June 2012 on ‘Keeping Cultures Alive: archives and indigenous human rights’ to see archivists addressing archives and human rights; archives and intellectual property rights; archives and rights to know; and archives’ role in society. New participatory models have been developed here too, which (Iacovino, 2010) ‘involve repositioning records subjects as records agents – participants in the act of record creation through time and space’. These new models give the subjects rights and duties. As Iacovino discusses, ‘the plurality of the archival voices changes the notion of how one defines the public good and the role of the state in record creatorship and ownership’ (Iacovino, 2010, 363). These new kinds of models involve the emerging idea of parallel provenance, where records come from different places with different meanings. Chazan, Baldwin and Madokoro (2015, 62–3) describe how this has led to new approaches to archiving often around ‘resisting both dominant historical narratives . . . and the authoritative powers that construct, consolidate, and disseminate such narratives’. The people undertaking this resistance are often those who have been the very subject of such exclusions, and once again, we are back to finding a way to make those voices heard and perhaps chart new ways forward to avoid these struggles having to take place again. Chazan, Baldwin and Madokoro (2015, 63) are rightly aware of the dangers of avoiding the trap of creating ‘alternative’ as opposed to ‘mainstream’ archives with all the implications these two categories entail. They explore ways to blur and complicate this binary nature via a project about documenting the voice of the ageing woman. The GRAN project, a community-driven initiative to create an archive for the Canadian Grandmothers Advocacy Network, allowed women to create and maintain their own story (81–2)

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giving them agency, and making them both archived and archiving. Their voices’ very existence broke down a sense of one complete narrative (83). The authors argue that in this approach ‘groups can assert agency through the process of archiving itself’ (Chazan, Baldwin and Madokoro, 81–4). Initiatives like these demonstrate an approach that not only ensures the capturing of multiple voices, but also does so in a way that empoweres the creators and forcibly collapses the binary nature of doers and done-to. And this is important. Kimberly Beasley has written recently about the concept of intersectionality, where for those with multiple identities ‘the intersection of these identities can lead to their invisibility’ (Beasley, 2016). Beasley argues that intersectionality is particularly relevant to community archives, as many of them are defined, as she puts it, ‘by identity categories’. Here, being labelled as ‘gay’ or ‘black’ can collapse a person into stereotyped categories, as a result of which the complex nature of the individual who is perhaps gay and black, and lots of other things besides, results in their true nature being lost. Interestingly, this disruption to the binary must also include the challenging of the relationship between archivist and reader. Where some have theorized archivists as maintaining the status quo in terms of power relations, there is also a sense in which the opposite also prevails. Historians and researchers can sometimes project the role of ‘handmaidens of history’ onto archivists, undermining their professional status and treating them as fetchers and carriers of files, invisible and of little intellectual worth. In this vein, Burton is a rare historical commentator on what she terms ‘the uneven power relations at work in archives between patrons and workers, “the legion of ‘fetchers’ ” whose class/status resentment was understood by some, less so by others’ (Levine, 2004, 286). The role of archivist itself needs clarification, by archivists themselves. And it is for archivists to take this step, and to own the archival space in all its nuances, addressing, for example, the need and impossibility of objectivity. Crookham, for instance, an archivist in a museum context, describes how in museums ‘While neutrality in the museum space is now widely questioned, there is still a widespread belief in the primacy of authenticity’ (Crookham, 2015, 28). He goes on to describe how despite this, museums do continue to acquire material whose provenance and authenticity is questionable, and the responsibility this places on the curator in terms of what narrative they construct for the public or researcher when

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that object is displayed. Crookham describes the case of a portrait and its transition from art to ‘historical material of a more documentary nature’ as its authenticity is doubted and its interpretation shifted. As an archivist, Crookham teases out the implications of this, and his discussion encompasses some of the discussion aired in Chapter 4 when we tackled the desire of researchers to project onto documents (or portraits in this case) that which is either not there or an interpretation that suits their current cause. Crookham’s example is, like Lisa Jardine’s in Chapter 4, a cautionary one. It is, however, sharply different from Jardine’s and appears in this chapter because it specifically deals with the beliefs of the curators or archivists, and the shifting interpretation not by researchers, but by the owning institutions. Archivists need to learn from it in terms of their approach to items in their own collections. It is this scrupulous professionalism that must be the way forward for archivists, if they are to continue to earn and maintain the trust of a broader community. One of the most important manifestations of this need for awareness of impartiality is in the process of cataloguing. For some time, there has been a growing awareness and willingness to tackle perceived bias in past descriptions of records, and efforts to reflect the content of records in more neutral terms (Johnson, 2007). One of the most important initiatives in this space is the Revisiting Collections programme.1 This initiative proposes: that in certain situations contributions made by users about records can offer information or interpretation that has a significant value and that ways need to be found to incorporate them within archive catalogues. The sea-change here is the notion that the single, neutral, authoritative and unattributed voice of the archive catalogue might be expanded, amplified and interpenetrated with a range of other, attributed voices. (Newman, 2012, 58)

In his seminal article on the programme, Newman goes on to discuss how ‘others have extended this argument, suggesting that existing archival tenets about the significance, arrangement and description of records are cultural constructs which are not always appropriate for other, particularly nonWestern, communities’. Newman describes how a Monash University project with the Koorie People of Victoria concluded that the community wanted to be able ‘to add their own stories and versions of other stories to

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records held in public archives and other institutions’. The ‘Koorie Annotation System’ now enables the People to ‘comment upon the inaccuracies or limitations of institutional records, to contribute family narratives which expand upon or give context to institutional records and to present their version of events alongside the official one’ (Newman, 2012, 61). Another similar article, this time on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Nathan, Shaffer and Castor, 2015) explicitly points to the desire ‘to develop practices that better account for pluralistic understandings of these materials, recognizing significant inequalities, silences, and absences in previous professional approaches’. This work has not only taken place in North American contexts, and Newman comments on the similar UK initiatives, such as the London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage of 2005, the 2009 Heritage Diversity Task Force, as well as The National Archives Caribbean Histories project of 2005, which amended catalogue descriptions, removing terms which are now considered offensive, and giving local people their own names. Current policy has also been adapted to ensure that practices of the past no longer occur. Other methods have been devised to shift thinking and practice in another manifestation of cataloguing and description. The Australian Series System deals with the issue of hierarchy. As Yeo has written: The Australian ‘Series System’ which emerged from Peter Scott’s work in the 1960s, deals with these challenges by separating what Scott called ‘context control’ from ‘record control’ (Cunningham 2010; Scott 1966). Its separate description of creators and series abandons assumptions that relationships between series and record-creating entities are hierarchical, and allows a series to be linked to as many record-creating entities as context documentation requires. (Yeo, 2017, 167)

Shifts like these act to undermine binary relationships of power expressed in catalogue descriptions. It could however, be argued that this view of the former failures of finding aids is not so much about silence, but about bias.2 Clearly the two are connected: if bias leads to the judgement that some archival content or actors are not worth mentioning in a description, then silence results. If material is represented in hierarchies of power, then the voices at the top

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of the hierarchy are more likely to be heard. Some voices will not make it even to the bottom rungs of the ladder, and the resulting silences can be profound. In these new initiatives then, I would argue, archivists are tackling bias and omission, allowing records to speak with new voices, and accepting in their practice that, as Yeo states, that ‘final or definitive descriptions’ are no longer possible (Yeo, 2017, 177).

Users as creators: taking back the power As we have seen, one way of ensuring that archives do contain more representative information is to work with the subjects of the records to ensure appropriate information capture. As discussed in Chapter 4, in recent years there has been an acceptance that archives are dynamic, not fixed, and that every use of them alters them, creating a new archive. This can be seen at the most basic level in the way historians and academics make their own selection of information and copies when they go to an archive, thereafter mixing that evidence with that from other archives and sources to create a new archive. Using a more proactive approach to information capture can result in a new approach, referred to as co-creation. Just like Iacovino, referenced above (and, interestingly, using almost identical language) McKemmish and Piggott (2013) argue that by expanding the definition of record creators to include everyone who has contributed to a record’s creative process or been directly affected by its action, notions of co-creation and parallel or simultaneous multiple provenances reposition ‘records subjects’ as ‘records agents’ and support a broader spectrum of rights, responsibilities and obligations relating to the ownership, management, accessibility and privacy of records. Terry Cook has suggested a similar approach. He wrote, ‘We have evolved as appraisal archivists . . . now . . . perhaps we are ready to share that appraisal function with citizens, broadly defined, where we engage our expertise with theirs in a blend of coaching, mentoring, and partnering’ (Cook, 2011, 182). Cook describes how community archives’ initiatives of various kinds are now seeking actively to make community archival records part of our broader archival heritage, something which is discussed further below. To do so requires archivists to recognize that some of their

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principles, rules, standards and definitions about what makes archives ‘authentic’ may be outdated or, at least, require significant rethinking. Cook went on to ask, ‘Do we dare assign appraisal value to those voices, these “sounds”, that heretofore no one heard? Should we not preserve these voices and sounds by indeed “democratizing archives” and “archiving democracy”, through participatory partnerships, with our fellow citizens, determining collaboratively and collectively with them of what society’s enduring archival memories should consist?’ (Cook, 2011, 184). Co-creation offers the possibility of helping resolve the difficulties concerning records of some of the most vulnerable people in society. Although he does not use the phrase co-creation, the work of Tom Shaw, who conducted the Scottish inquiry into systemic abuse in children’s homes (Shaw, 2007), comes close to demonstrating how co-creation might work. He spent a lot of time during the course of his inquiry investigating the significance and value of records to inmates and former inmates of such establishments. While records were essential to the work of his review, he also learned that records have particular significance to former residents. Some former residents lacking basic information about their lives reported to Shaw that they did not have a sense of belonging or identity. On a practical level, former residents may find it difficult to obtain passports, birth certificates and to gather their medical histories. The personal details known to most of us, including birth names, birth dates, nationality, mother’s maiden name and so on, may simply be unknown to former residents. Some told Shaw that for many years they felt socially excluded from those who grew up in family homes, knowing their parents, siblings and other family members. Records may permit former residents to trace their family connections and to move towards a sense of belonging to family and community. It is this sort of painstaking analysis of the needs and wishes of the subjects of records which could be embodied in a reality of co-creation which would mean this kind of experience was banished to the past. Similar issues arose in Australia, where 60% of former residents of care homes were able to access their records, and many who did were shocked, angry and disappointed at the information they contained. One response has been to encourage people who experienced ‘care’ to tell their own stories to record a fuller narrative. However, this is no substitute for better record keeping. The response of some Australian activists has been to develop the concept of archival autonomy – the ability for individuals and communities

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to participate in societal memory with their own voice, becoming participatory agents in record keeping and archiving for identity, memory and accountability purposes. Two of their initiatives were concerned respectively with the rights of indigenous people to information in archives, and with care leavers (Evans et al., 2015). Other initiatives working with these communities have sought to try and address the gaps in the past. Jones and O’Neill, too, discuss how archives are of huge value to these communities. Yet these people often face enormous obstacles accessing records, and doing so may re-invoke traumatic circumstances. Jones and O’Neill have therefore been involved in the creation of a new digital resource, the ‘Find and Connect’3 web resource, a resource they describe as ‘a national collaborative project where archivists, historians and social workers work in consultation with government and the community to make hundreds of distributed record collections more discoverable, accessible and understandable’ (Jones and O’Neill, 2014, 111). Jones and O’Neill relate the story of the ‘Forgotten Australians’, and the various reports from the early 2000s which exposed the injustices faced by this group. The reports contained recommendations about records, particularly about the importance of records to the identity of the victims, which can often be the only records of their childhood. The Find and Connect project, launched in 2011, is deliberately a space where there are multiple stakeholders, multiple perspectives and multiple (and often competing) truths. The aim was to create a public knowledge space that also has relevance and meaning to people who have different views of the past. This is an area of Australian history that is very much still contested. The goal is to acknowledge the complexity of this area of history, and to build a web resource that is able to encompass conundrums about history, truth, rights and wrongs – while at the same time being a practical and meaningful knowledge base for all sorts of users. (Jones and O’Neill, 2014, 115–16)

It is this new acceptance of history as ambiguous, contested, open to change and open to contribution from all that is a real step forward here, and shows the positive healing and genuine contribution archival practice and policy undertaken with integrity can achieve, where records subjects can establish greater ownership. And this change of status is important, shifting the balance of power.

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Other victims of state oppression have recognized this explicitly. The civic groups who stormed the Stasi offices in East Berlin in 1990 shouted ‘Freedom for my file’, believing that the files would prove the wrong they have suffered, changing them from victim to plaintiff (Ketelaar, 2008, 13). Gradually, states are beginning to acknowledge that record subjects have rights in regard to the record. The 1998 UK Data Protection Act allows data subjects to request the courts to order correction, erasure, blocking or destruction of data that are inaccurate or which contain an expression of opinion that appears to be based on inaccurate data. In Australia, Freedom of Information legislation allows people to request annotation or amendment of records containing personal information, while in the Netherlands, a patient has the right to have certain parts of his or her medical file erased or the entire file destroyed (Ketelaar, 2008, 14). Co-creation is a significant way in which archives can respond to the challenges of the digital world. Russo and Watkins have argued that: Beginning with the advent of broadcasting and increasing with the internet, cultural institutions have faced critical challenges which include drawing audiences into their physical spaces and providing cultural interactive experiences which are both novel and entertaining. . . . Few have come to terms with the profound shift in contemporary society from ‘passive’ media consumption to audience interaction with content: that is, few have established distribution models which not only provide access but display and allow interaction with the products of community co-created content. (Russo and Watkins, 2005)

Russo and Watkins described a number of projects designed to enable members of the community to work with cultural institutions to co-create content. The State Library of Queensland has a project called Queensland Stories, which enables the community to create its own ‘digital stories’, short multimedia narratives constructed from personal photographs and memories. In Thailand the Ban Jalae Hill Life Tribe and Culture Centre works with the northern Thai tribes to capture a vanishing way of life through digital storytelling, folk music recordings, community interviews and recording traditional ceremonials (Russo and Watkins, 2005). Eric Ketelaar has stressed the potential of archives as a place of stories, proposing that they use Web 2.0 features to stimulate people to upload their stories, their documents, to the archival institution’s server, forming

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relationships between private and public documents and establishing communities of records. By ingesting people’s stories, we make the archive – already a place of memory and mourning – into a place of understanding, of forgiving, of reconciliation (Ketelaar, 2008, 17). Ketelaar argues that in a world in which the subjects of records as well as users and archivists continually interact with the archive, then the record is never finished. Although a file is closed, every interaction with it by creator, user and archivists is an activation of the record and each activation is an act of cocreatorship determining the record’s meaning (Ketelaar, 2008, 12). Cassie Findlay has written about the archive of US State Department cables which was formed following the WikiLeaks event. She described an archive which is very fluid and which embraces user-contributed analysis and comment: The [Cablegate] archive is still forming and will continue to develop as comment, debate, challenge and reflection on the cables proliferates in blogs and on Twitter, in traditional media, in public art, academic journals and elsewhere. Developers are building tools to interrogate, re-use or visualise the cables data in a huge variety of ways. Can we see the relationships between cables from a certain period of time and location? The Cablegate search tool, for example, has a commenting facility. Are you personally mentioned in a cable? Is what is said true? This is the vision of user-contributed analysis and comment on whistleblower releases originally conceived of by WikiLeaks in full flight. (Findlay, 2013, 15)

Accepting inevitable silence Yet, particularly as users, we must continue to be aware of the silence which is not a silence at all, but the result of projecting the existence of evidence into a space where none exists. We must return to the story told in Chapter 4 by Lisa Jardine, in her recent book Temptation in the Archives (Jardine, 2015). Jardine describes what became a kind of quest for a particular letter. Finally locating it, she describes the excitement mounting as she heads to The National Archives to look at the letter, hoping it will contain the answer to something raised elsewhere in other evidence. Did it? As she is honest enough to confess, ‘The answer turned out to be a resounding “No” ’. Though Jardine was able to use the letter in her researches, she was also aware that this incident also acted ‘to remind us that not everything we scholars undertake in good faith will turn out to yield fruit’.

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This cautionary tale does not only apply to scholars. There is an element of obsession where, once evidence becomes hard or impossible to find, an importance is imputed to it that emerges entirely from the fact that it cannot be found. This very absence can spark off conviction that the missing document has to contain the evidence one seeks, at worst, conspiracy theories that archivists or their masters have destroyed or hidden evidence. As Jardine points out, when that missing evidence is found, sometimes, all that is revealed is disappointment on the part of the researcher. If users take on responsibilities as co-creators, part of that responsibility, as Jardine exemplified, is to be scrupulous and honest that when we lack knowledge we cannot fill that gap with fanciful imaginings that have no basis in fact.

Changing voices in a new digital world And this is where the advent of a new kind of archive promises to change the whole context. We are of course referring to the digital archive: a new kind of archive, with new structures, new ways of searching, a paradigm shift in record keeping. And in this new world, do we even need the appraisal and co-creation we have been discussing in such depth and with such seriousness? In this new digital world, shouldn’t we just be keeping everything? Simply pick up the computer, remove the hard drive, transfer the files. And yet, though it all sounds simple, is it really? The problem is of course that the very scale itself is what creates problems here (Johnson, Ranade and Thomas, 2014). However, scale has some positives: the sheer number of records and sources inevitably leads to the reduced privileging of that one voice of which we spoke above. The very messiness and diversity of the digital record is one large reason why other voices will be heard – it is simply much harder to control information or exclude all but one voice. As Findlay points out, ‘Slowly but surely, the complete trust and reliance on large information gatekeepers, like governments and big media players, has morphed into recognition that these are simply some of many voices and not necessarily the authoritative ones. Many people are just as likely to trust what they read from an influential blogger or Tweeter, as they are an official communication or news report’ (Findlay, 2013, 9–10). And it is with this ability to be one of these voices in the digital space

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that we return to community archives, a movement utterly transformed by the potential of digital, the power to set up websites, to upload records of their own making and their own choosing, and crucially, to do this on their own. As Stevens, Flinn and Shepherd comment, ‘until recently, if a community wished to hand over its records (and could find a public repository willing to take them), this traditionally meant surrendering control not just over the arrangement and description of their records, but also over their ownership and exploitation’ (Stevens, Flinn and Shepherd, 2010, 61). The means to create digital community archives has transformed this picture. Stevens, Flinn and Shepherd describe how imagining ‘the custodial models that might serve the ends of a democratised heritage has been facilitated by the technological innovations associated with digitisation and the prevalence of born-digital records, which call into question traditional assumptions about the need for all records to be held in a single physical location. The one-way “handing over” of records to the public domain is starting to give way to the “handing on” both inside and outside the archives of a wide diversity of materials, knowledge and skills’ (Stevens, Flinn and Shepherd, 2010, 61). The concept of parallel provenance discussed above also operates to the same end. The breakdown of single meanings in the digital world can support new more fluid and shared concepts of archives. It is specifically the shift to digital that has facilitated this change. And the potential impact of this shift to the multiple voice is transformational. As Findlay argues, ‘Having a statutory mandate as a government archives and access to guaranteed continued resourcing is designed to engender trust among citizens that archives will last. This leads to a skewing of the historical record in favour of governments, simply by virtue of their establishment by statute, longevity and assumed continued resourcing’ (Findlay, 2013, 16). Imagine therefore, as she goes on to point out, what would happen if we simply trusted non-official as much as official? Others have enthusiastically agreed. ‘The world in which one or a few professional archivists worked on the sole mission of shaping how a society remembers is being displaced by a more democratised culture and the new generation of digitally networked archivists that are its natives’ (Pang, Liew and Chan, 2014, 1). The advent of technology which can easily be harnessed

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by all has empowered the powerless and enabled a new archival movement, the tide of which cannot be turned back. But the digital can also bring new voices to the archive in other ways too. Veirum and Christensen, writing about Denmark, state that ‘According to the first-ever national wide survey including all government and government-recognized museums (Kulturarvsstyrelsen 2009, 50), 13% of 14–49-year old visitors to Danish museums first heard of the museum on the Internet’ (Veirum and Christensen, 2011, 3). Museums, alongside other cultural heritage sites, are notorious for attracting a majority of their audience from older white, middle-class citizens, and this statistic shows how the digital resource or internet access has the potential to open up heritage to an audience which does not currently access cultural heritage. Veirum and Christensen found that giving teenagers the opportunity to communicate and use digital and social media of their choice on their terms opened up interest and engagement with the museum in a significant way (Veirum and Christensen, 2011, 4). So new voices are being heard; and more than that. They are acting. And archivists are acting, too, to keep material in a different way. Digital technologies are enabling far more material to be kept than ever before, so that deliberate or misjudged efforts to weed out records, and sampling, have been replaced by the wholesale retention of classes of records. And some digital citizens are taking pre-emptive action. Archive Team describe themselves as ‘a loose collective of rogue archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths dedicated to saving our digital heritage’. Since 2009, they have ‘caught wind of shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions – and done our best to save the history before it’s lost forever’. Their website is described as ‘an offloading point and information depot for a number of archiving projects, all related to saving websites or data that is in danger of being lost. Besides serving as a hub for team-based pulling down and mirroring of data, this site will provide advice on managing your own data and rescuing it from the brink of destruction.’4 These digital actors are doing something online that they could not possibly do in the paper world: making their own decisions about what should be kept – and keeping it. Caron and Brown have described how ‘the innovation of digital media and networks is also transforming information’ (Caron and Brown, 2011, 11). They describe what we know: that ‘we are witnessing the genesis and

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proliferation of wholly new forms of information production and media with no foreseeable innovation end in sight’. They describe how archives are facing, with little experience, new technologies, but facing equally – and in my view more importantly – new ‘documentary products’ being created. In this way, the digital is and will continue to be deeply disruptive. The authors go on to point out that there are also fundamental changes in the relationship between people and information, which is becoming increasingly commoditized (Caron and Brown, 2011, 12). Finally they point out that ‘advances in information and communications technologies are fundamentally altering the way people think about, understand, interpret, assign meaning to, create, use, produce, exchange, receive, store, and provide information’. The digital is disruptive in other ways, too, creating entirely new ways, not only of creating and keeping material, but of accessing it. The National Archives ‘Traces Through Time’ project in the UK offers users searching The National Archives catalogue Discovery the opportunity to take advantage of a new technology which offers potential matches of the same individual from other datasets as well as the one being searched, offering the opportunity to push the search out into the digital dimension in a way that would be impossible in the paper world (Johnson, Ranade and Thomas, 2014).5 Tools from the Clarin EU-funded research project offer similar search functions (see www.clarin.eu). Simply stated, the digital is fundamentally disruptive. Pietrobruno discusses how in the digital age algorithms are even replacing the traditional hierarchical and humanly imposed structures that have been the basis of archival thinking and practice from its very inception. He claims: The listing produced by algorithms, according to Ernst (2006), unsettles the previous ordering in traditional archives by bringing together documents that were once detached and set apart in unconnected units. Lists that mathematically connect units in digital archives can disrupt the traditional archival order and practice, in which distinct documents are linked through interpretive narratives realised by human agency. (Pietrobruno, 2014, 747)

The archival world is still at the beginning of experimentation with large volumes of digital data. Developments in this space – for example, advanced sense-making tools, legal discovery software and social network analysis

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software – may in the future make it possible for archivists to manage and offer access to archive and information in entirely different ways. Whatever one’s viewpoint, the fact remains that digital has changed the world of archives forever. There is no going back.

Conclusion Archives and archivists have been powerful tools in supporting memory, or those denied a voice in the past. Hariz Halilovich, for example, uses the very metaphor we have used here in an article about archives entitled ‘Reclaiming erased lives’ (Halilovich, 2014), describing how survivors of ethnic cleansing recreated their own archives in an effort to recreate and reassert their own lives. Halilovich describes how, ‘despite attempts to erase them physically, symbolically and bureaucratically, the survivors have been able to use their own memory resources to reconstruct their identities and places in both real and cyber space’ (Halilovich, 2014, 236). See also Halilovich (2016). Baumgartner et al. state that: The role of testimony and documentation is crucial to human rights work. . . . Such evidence is vital in societies seeking to deal with a past of human rights violations as well as for ongoing human rights campaigns. The documentation of past human rights violations can help with the prosecution of perpetrators, identification of victims for reparations programmes, and the planning of memorials. It can also contribute to the embedding of a new human rights culture through the active dissemination of personal testimonies which can sensitize the public to past violations, assist in rewriting of school textbooks and other educational materials, and lead to recommendations for new forms of human rights practice. (Baumgartner et al., 2016, 1. See also http://archivesproject.swisspeace.ch)

In a recent article, Kathleen Roe outlines how archives are inspiring, protect rights, support the creation of new knowledge and give voice to communities. She states that ‘archives have impact, archives matter’ (Roe, 2016, 13). This is archives and archival theory and practice, by all, at its best. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu stated, ‘Archives are the bulwark of a free society’ (cited in Roe, 2016, 6). And that seems a good place to end.

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Notes 1 Collections Trust, Revisiting Collections programme, see www.collectionstrust.org.uk/item/849-what-is-revisiting-collections. 2 The author is grateful to Geoffrey Yeo for pointing this out. 3 Find and Connect website, www.findandconnect.gov.au. 4 Archive Team at http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page, 2016. 5 See also The National Archives, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk.

References Acker, A. and Brubaker, J. R. (2014) Death, Memorialization, and Social Media: a platform perspective for personal archives, Archivaria, 77, 1–23. Baumgartner, E., Hamber, B., Jones, B., Kelly, G. and Oliveira, I. (2016) Documentation, Human Rights and Transitional Justice, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 8, 1–5. Beasley, K. (2016) Intersectionality in the Archive: communities and beyond, ARC Magazine, 125, 28–9. Burton, A. (2004) Archive Stories: gender in the making of imperial and colonial histories. In Levine, P. (ed.), Gender and Empire, Oxford University Press. Caron, D. J. and Brown, R. (2011) The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: establishing new value propositions for public memory, Archivaria, 71, 1–20. Chazan, M., Baldwin, M. and Madokoro, L. (2015) Aging, Activism, and the Archives: feminist perspectives for the 21st century, Archivaria, 80, 59–87. Clarin, EU Research project, at http://clarin.eu/ Cook, T. (2011) ‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: archival appraisal past, present and future, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32 (2), 173–89. Crookham, A. (2015) Art or Document? Layard’s legacy and Bellini’s sultan, Museum History Journal, 8 (1), 28–40. Cunningham, A. (ed.) (2010) The Arrangement and Description of Archives Amid Administrative and Technological Change, Brisbane, Australian Society of Archivists. Evans, J., McKemmish, S., Daniels, E. and McCarthy G. (2015) Self-determinism and Archival Autonomy: advocating activism, Archival Science, 15 (4), 337–68. Findlay, C. (2013) People, Records and Power: what archives can learn from WikiLeaks, Archives and Manuscripts, 41 (1), 7–22.

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Halilovich, H. (2014) Reclaiming Erased Lives: archives, records and memories in post-war Bosnia and the Bosnian diaspora, Archival Science, 14 (3–4), 231–47. Halilovich, H. (2016) Re-imaging and Re-imagining the Past after ‘Memoricide’: intimate archives as inscribed memories of the missing, Archival Science, 16 (1), 77–92. Hurley, C. (2001) The Evolving Role of Government Archives in Democratic Societies, Plenary Address delivered to ACA Annual Conference, Winnipeg, June 2001, www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/groups/rcrg/publications/ ch-demo0603.pdf.. Iacovino, L. (2010) Rethinking Archival, Ethical and Legal Frameworks for Records of Indigenous Australian Communities: a participant relationship model of rights and responsibilities, Archival Science, 10 (4), 353–72. Jardine, L. (2015) Temptation in the Archives: essays in Golden Age Dutch culture, UCL Press, particularly Chapter 1. Johnson, V. (2007) Creating History? Confronting the myth of objectivity in the archive, Archives, 32, 117. Johnson, V., Ranade, S. and Thomas, D. (2014) Size Matters: the implications of volume for the digital archive of tomorrow – a case study from the UK National Archives, Records Management Journal, 24 (3), 206–37. Jones, M. and O’Neill, C. (2014) Identity, Records and Archival Evidence: exploring the needs of forgotten Australians and former child migrants, Archives and Records, 35 (2), 110–25. Ketelaar, E. (2008) Archives as Spaces of Memory, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 29 (1) 9–27. Levine, P. (ed.) (2004) Gender and Empire, Oxford University Press. Lynch, B. (2013) Reflective Debate, Radical Transparency and Trust in the Museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 28 (1), 1–13. Lynch, B. T. and Alberti, S. (2010) Legacies of Prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 25 (1), 13–35. Mak, B. (2012) On the uses of authenticity, Archivaria, 73, 1–17. Marstine, J., Bauer, A. A. and Haines, C. (2011) New Directions in Museum Ethics, Museum Management and Curatorship, 26 (2), 91–5. McKemmish, S. and Piggott, M. (2013) Toward the Archival Multiverse: challenging the binary opposition of the personal and corporate archive in modern archival theory and practice, Archivaria, 76, 137.

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McKemmish, S., Russell, L., Castan, M. and Iacovino, L. (eds) (2012) Keeping Cultures Alive: archives and indigenous human rights, Archival Science, 12 (2), 93–111. Moss, M. (2012) Where Have all the Files Gone? Lost in Action Points Every One?, Journal of Contemporary History, 47 (4), 860–75. Nathan, L. P., Shaffer E. and Castor, M. (2015) Stewarding Collections of Trauma: plurality, responsibility, and questions of action, Archivaria, 80, 89–118. Newman, J. (2012) Revisiting Archive Collections: developing models for participatory cataloguing, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 33 (1), 57–73. Pang, N., Liew, K. K. and Chan, B. (2014) Participatory Archives in a World of Ubiquitous Media, Archives and Manuscripts, 42 (1), 1–4. Pietrobruno, S. (2014) Between Narratives and Lists: performing digital intangible heritage through global media, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 20 (7–8), 742–59. Pollard, R. A. (2001) The Appraisal of Personal Papers: a critical literature review, Archivaria, 52, 136–50. Roe, K. D. (2016) Why Archives?, The American Archivist, 79 (1), 6–13. Russo, A. and Watkins, J. (2005) Digital Cultural Communication: enabling new media and co-creation in South-East Asia, International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 1, 4, http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=107.&layout=html. Scott, P. J. (1966). The Record Group Concept: a case for abandonment, American Archivist, 29, 493–504. Sebina, P. (2009) Freedom of Information: erosion of the archive?, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 30 (2), 147–65. Shaw, T. (2007) Historic Abuse, Systemic Review (Edinburgh, Scottish Government). Shilton, K. and Srinivasan, R. (2007) Participatory Appraisal and Arrangement for Multicultural Archival Collections, Archivaria, 63, 88–101. Stevens, M., Flinn, A. and Shepherd, E. (2010) New Frameworks for Community Engagement in the Archive Sector: from handing over to handing on, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 16 (1–2), 59–76. Veirum, N. E. and Christensen, M. F. (2011) If It’s Not on the Net It Doesn’t Exist, Museum Management and Curatorship, 26 (1), 3–9. Yeo, G. (2017) Continuing Debates about Description,. In MacNeil, H. and Eastwood, T. (eds), Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd edn, Libraries Unlimited, 163–92.

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CHAPTER 7 Are things getting better or worse? David Thomas

The most significant change in archives over the past 30 years and continuing into the future has been the move to the digital. While this has had huge benefits in terms of availability of and access to resources, it is posing challenges which may lead to silences in the future. The major benefit of the move to the digital is the improvement of access which it has facilitated. Now catalogues are largely available online and increasing numbers of digital copies of paper records and born-digital originals are also accessible. However, there are concerns about the way in which users interface with catalogues (see Chapter 4). Anyone who has been involved in putting catalogues online will rapidly come to learn, that, while there are good standards for describing records, there are no similar standards for web interfaces for archive catalogues and the process of making material available is a constant and sometimes wearing debate with web designers and other IT professionals. It is important that we respond to the criticisms of online catalogues which Dorian Gerhold and others have made. While they acknowledge the huge benefit they bring, they have serious concerns about usability (see Chapter 2). Recently, there has been some interesting thinking and some work done to make catalogues more inclusive and less biased and thus to reduce silences (see Chapter 6). However, there still remain problems. The usability and neutrality of archival catalogues is under attack. People who have approached archives from a design perspective have noted that digital

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archives, in particular, are dynamic. Cataloguing, description and digitization are slow and costly processes; as such archives exist in various forms of incompleteness, yet institutions are under pressure to share digital collections in order to better engage with a contemporary audience. Recently, Tom Schofield, Lecturer in Digital Cultures and his colleagues at Newcastle University did some work to understand the users of the archive of the poetry publisher Bloodaxe Books. Their initial research demonstrated concerns with the failure of the catalogue to reflect the views of potential users: ‘virtually all of the aspects identified as interesting by the participants were not intended to be described in metadata in the forthcoming catalogue, and thus would not be represented in future interfaces to the archive’ (Schofield et al., 2015, para 23). More significantly, Schofield and his co-workers were critical of the neutrality of archival catalogues: One of the motivations for maintaining an ostensibly neutral catalogue based on international standards for record keeping is to defer the interpretative moment outside of the catalogue and its interface to allow for a plurality of approaches later on. We sympathize with this position but it is hugely problematized of course by the nature of any claims to neutrality. As Drucker (2013) has pointed out, the design of our interfaces already embodies an epistemological commitment inherited from particular cultural traditions and emphasising hierarchy, standardization, and objectivity. (Schofield et al., 2015, para 62)

The research by Schofield and colleagues shows that further work is still needed if catalogues are to fully meet the needs of users and are no longer to be a form of sound insulation, leading to greater silences. We now have reached what is probably the second generation of online archive catalogues – the first generation were simple databases or online PDF structures, while the second generation offer more powerful search tools. It is essential that the third generation is entirely driven by user requirements and is fully accessible to users from all backgrounds. The excellent online family history systems provided by Ancestry and FindMyPast show what can be done in this space. However, there have been some hugely positive developments. In 1998, a survey of archives run by higher education bodies in the UK found that only a vanishingly small number of institutions had no catalogues of their

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holdings, but that only about half of the total number of holdings were catalogued to piece level. Since 2006, The National Archives has administered a fund to help local archives tackle cataloguing backlogs. About £4 million has been spent over 11 years, the money coming from the Pilgrim Trust and a number of other charities.1 As a result, a large number of records have emerged from their silences. The information currently available shows that, in general, users of archive catalogues seem reasonably satisfied with their quality. In the UK, there is an annual survey of users of archives. The 2014 report published by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy showed that 93% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of paper catalogues and 86% were satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of online catalogues, but only 53% of those surveyed responded to the question about paper catalogues and only 40% responded to the question about online catalogues. The 2014 figures show an improvement over the results in 2007, which were published for the Public Services Quality Group, when 87% of respondents thought that lists, indexes, lists and reference books were good or very good. However, it is not possible to be sure whether people were satisfied because they had found all the material relevant to their search or whether there were undiscovered records which would have been of value to them but which they had not found. Somewhere between 2020 and 2025, if David Nicholas and Ian Chowcat (see Chapter 3) are to be believed, archives will be servicing a generation of users who will want to access resources instantly from anywhere using mobile devices. According to Nicholas (2017), for the digital natives the mobile phone is the library, while researchers’ information horizons which were once bound by libraries and archives are now borderless. Archives need to find ways to meet the needs of the coming generation or their future users will shift their focus to resources which are available in the way they wish to access them. The archive will have silenced itself. The volume of records which are now available online is changing the nature of historical research. Anyone looking at the huge corpora of digital records which have been released onto the internet either as a result of legal action (e.g. Enron) or as a result of leaks (the Stratfor e-mails in WikiLeaks) will recognize that it is not possible to apply the techniques of ‘close reading’ to such volumes of born-digital or digitized records. Instead, pieces of evidence can be extracted from a digital corpus by using search tools.

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Effectively, records are becoming data to be mined. Fortunately, excellent work is being done globally to develop techniques to improve the way in which large volumes of digital records can be searched and visualized and these will eventually shine a light into the darkness of huge clouds of digital records. At Columbia University, work has been done on the US State Department Central Foreign Policy files from the 1970s and a collection of Henry Kissinger’s e-mails and this has improved searchability and access to these resources. At Carnegie Mellon University, the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon project has made use of text mining to analyse the contents of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and then used social network analysis tools to produce a visualization showing the 200,000 links between 13,000 people in Early Modern England. The result is a clickable visualization which enables users to quickly see who had relations with whom and of what sort in the political class of the time (Warren et al., 2016). As well as improving search techniques, the growth of the digital has made it possible to deliver historical information in new ways. A good example is the Virtual Paul’s Cross project,2 which has created a virtual reality, three-dimensional model of the famous preaching cross in the churchyard of Old St Paul’s Cathedral, London, where we can hear John Donne preach his Gunpowder Day sermon on a cold 5 November in 1622, accompanied by dogs barking and birds calling. The other major benefit of the digital is that it makes it possible to deal with the issues about selection and about the sampling of records which were described in Chapter 1. The relatively low costs of storing digital records means that many more can be preserved. In 1965, the Advisory Council on Public Records in the UK advised that 20th-century military records should not be preserved (Lord Chancellor’s Department, 1981, 32). Now, the soldiers’ records from World War I are available online. While some archives continue to sample records, this is becoming less necessary in the digital world. Equally, the move to providing large volumes of digital records online means that the concern that archives have focused on the rich and powerful no longer applies. Online censuses, military service records and similar materials provide us with a larger and more comprehensive sample of the population than was possible in the analogue age and such material is easily accessible. In the UK, in the paper world, it was easy to trace the careers of army officers through the published Army Lists; the service records of other ranks had to be sought in paper archives

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and there was no central index. Now, increasingly, resources for tracing the careers of ordinary soldiers are being made available online – the surviving records of the people who fought in World War I can be consulted from a home computer or tablet. So far so good, but the digital may, in some ways lead to less openness. It may have a huge impact on the long-term position of archives as institutions. The increased availability of large digital collections online has begun to erode the traditional archival model, where archives were central to acquisition, storage and release of information. Increasingly, access to records comes filtered through technology and is no longer dependent on a memory organization to deliver it. As Marlene Manoff observed: The archive is no longer a collection of artefacts, books, and records confined to particular locations that we may seek out if we so desire. Much of the archival record now consists of streams of data invading our work and private lives, perpetually tempting us to consume or contribute just a little more. The state, large memory institutions, and media companies are no longer the sole superintendents of the archival record. Individuals now have the tools to build their own digital archives and organize and manipulate them. This proliferation of digital media, wireless technology, and mobile devices has begun to erode the boundaries between virtual and material worlds. Mobile devices foster constant connection to the archive. We are immersed in and no longer separable from the data streams in which we swim. (Manoff, 2010, 391–2)

The collections of records made available by WikiLeaks, including large caches from the US State Department, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the Saudi Arabian Foreign Ministry are perhaps the ultimate expression of the changing nature of the archive. These deracinated, decontextualized assemblies of documents, which in an earlier world would eventually have found their way to the US National Archives, a Clinton Library or a Saudi Arabian archive, exist in a sort of limbo – dubious, unacknowledged but nevertheless immensely fascinating, like an illegitimate child in a Victorian novel. The problem with such developments is that there is no certainty as to the continuing availability of those, or indeed, any online resources. Luke Tredinnick of London Metropolitan University (Tredinnick, 2008, 156, 161) said that by undermining the stability of the historical record digital technologies undermine the role of the archive and the security of a knowable

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past. At the moment, there is no coherent business model to describe which institutions should be responsible for particular aspects of archiving large online data streams and a confused and confusing picture has emerged in which there is both huge duplication and, at the same time, a real risk that important material will be lost and there will be further silences. It is not clear, in the UK at least, what is being done about archiving large datasets produced by government, local authorities and public organizations or privatized businesses such as the railway operating companies, However, the most significant example of the danger of archival silences is the issue of archiving the internet. There is no doubt that this is a valuable resource and that failure to ensure its survival would be a major loss, since websites are undoubtedly records. But is it sensible that so many institutions have decided to jump on the web-archiving bandwagon? The Internet Archive is a major player, but so too is the Library of Congress and, in the UK, the British Library and The National Archives. This potentially leads to duplication and to the waste of resources which could, perhaps, be better used to preserve other, more vulnerable digital records. Moreover, it has been claimed that the internet is not being archived very well. For a long time, people have believed that the archiving of websites by the Internet Archive has ensured their preservation, but in 2015 questions began to be asked about their ways of working. It was pointed out that the Internet Archive does not produce an inventory of the sites it has archived, while the details of the algorithms which determine the sites that are selected have not been published. Its collection of sites is, at best, patchy. The result, according to Kalev Leetaru, is that ‘it is clear that the web is disappearing before our very eyes and thus it is imperative that we do a better job of archiving the online world and do it before this material is lost forever’ (Leetaru, 2015). Writing in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, Liebler and Liebert claimed that for the period 1996–2010, ‘the number of websites that are no longer working cited by [the United States] Supreme Court opinions is alarmingly high, almost one third (29%). Our research in Supreme Court cases also found that the rate of disappearance is not affected by the type of online document (pdf, html, etc.) or the sources of links (government or non-government) in terms of what links are now dead’ (Liebler and Liebert, 2013, 1). When the preceding paragraph was first drafted, these concerns seemed valid, but a bit remote. Losing material cited by the US Supreme Court is,

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after all, mainly a concern for lawyers. However, it suddenly became horribly real between the first and second drafts of the book, when two pieces of information which we had intended to quote suddenly vanished from the internet. One of these was Archives New Zealand’s Digital Continuity Plan, which disappeared from the website, but luckily a copy had been saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. This was useful, except that it can only be found if you happen to know the URL it had when it was live. More annoyingly, a post by Harry Cooper of the CIA about the problems of large volumes of data seems to have gone and I cannot find it on the Wayback Machine. Sad, because Cooper talked sense. Equally, tweets, Facebook pages, etc., are stored in remote and unidentified servers and are not always capable of being archived by their creators. Twitter, for example, which described itself as the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party, has prevented organizations from archiving the deleted tweets of politicians (Sotteck, 2015). Stuart Jeffrey (2012) described this use of social media as having the potential to lead to a second digital dark age. The case of Twitter is significant. Most of Twitter is trivial and much of its research value has been compromised by the purchase by politicians and others of false followers, as well as the automated generation of tweets by so-called Twitterbots. Nevertheless, it does contain significant material, notably some political announcements, for example the tweets by Donald Trump and, perhaps more interestingly, human responses to tragedies. So, such material should be preserved and the Library of Congress is doing so. However, the Library of Congress’s archiving of Twitter has been criticized on a number of grounds (Zimmer, 2015). First, it is argued that its work has been very slow and there is concern about if and when researchers will be able to access this resource. Second, because Twitter is a private sector, for-profit organization, it is able to impose its own rules on the Library of Congress. One such rule is that access to archived tweets is restricted to staff of the Library of Congress and bona fide scholars. But who will be regarded by the authorities as a bona fide scholar – a US academic for sure, but who else will be in or out? Thirdly, there are concerns about the data – will the Library of Congress block access to certain categories of material, notably controversial or illegal material (for example, will tweets by followers of Islamic State be preserved and made available?). Finally, there are concerns about privacy – how will the right to privacy be reconciled

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with the right of access? An article in the August 2016 edition of The Atlantic by Andrew McGill revealed that the Library of Congress project was still stalled and that since the happy days of 2010, when the Library had agreed to take the archive, and 2016, the number of tweets had increased from 55 million to 500 million a day. At the moment, it seems that, while institutions are competing to archive the internet, nobody is responsible for other potentially significant collections of digital resources created outside the public sector. For example, in 2016, the British-based Friends Reunited announced that it was closing. This had been one of the first social media sites, allowing former school and university students and workers to establish links with their fellow students or co-workers from the past. It had over 10 million registered users and was notorious at one time for causing the break-up of marriages and relationships, as people sought out childhood sweethearts and rekindled their romances. In 2009, the Mail Online announced the first Friends Reunited murder (Cohen, 2009). Although the site’s owners have promised to allow people to recover photographs they had placed on the site, there is currently no information as to what will happen to the whole Friends Reunited archive and it seems nobody is responsible. The private sector and not-for-profit organizations such as the Internet Archive have become more involved in archiving major collections. But the private sector has not been wholly successful in providing a safe or consistent home for digital archives. Google, for example, set up an ambitious project to digitize newspaper archives and by 2011 they had digitized about 2000 newspapers (McGee, 2011) – at which point, they decided not to add any more functionality to the site or to accept any more microfilm for digitization. Their site lives on in a curious limbo-like existence, incomplete and ill-formed. We have seen the private sector and publicly funded institutions struggling to keep up with the need to archive large-scale online resources which have a significant record value. In some areas such as the internet, there appear to be competing collection policies; in others there seems to be real uncertainty as to who is responsible for collecting resources created outside the public sector. There is a very real risk that, without more global co-operation, the creation of such resources will outrun the capability of even the largest institutions to capture them and that we are entering an age where significant records are being lost.

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Moreover, the decision by many archives to sell images of their records to online family history websites is having an impact. On the one hand, this has made many more records available in many locations to a wide audience, but in the long term, it might seriously weaken the link between archives and their users and this might harm the position of archives. Hard to mount a campaign to fight off cuts in archives if the vast majority of your users only access your material through the intermediation of Ancestry or FindMyPast. There is hope in the USA, at least, with the development of the free Digital Public Library of America, which is driven by the two forces which shaped America – utopianism and pragmatism. As Robert Darnton (2013), the founding genius of the library said, ‘For all its futuristic technology, the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century. What could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans? What could be more pragmatic than the designing of a system to link up millions of megabytes and deliver them to readers in the form of easily accessible texts?’ The system provides information about the organization holding the original and in some cases links back to it, thus ensuring that the link between users and holding organizations is maintained. Sadly a similar vision is lacking in the UK. There have been a number of positive developments in allowing individuals and communities some control over their archives. These developments, which are discussed in detail in Chapter 6, include legislation permitting citizens to demand changes to records relating to themselves to correct inaccuracies or unfair expressions of opinions, as well as enabling users to annotate archives with stories or information or to add descriptions to catalogues. In Australia, archivists have worked with members of indigenous communities and former residents of care homes to improve access to records and to contribute their own voices to the archive. One of the most positive developments in the UK over the past ten years, which has done much to improve the quality of record selection and preservation, has come out of the tragedy of the abuse of children in care. In 2007, Tom Shaw conducted a review of systemic child abuse in Scotland. His report highlighted significant failings in records management in the child care sector (see Chapter 6). He recommended that the Scottish Government should commission a review of public records legislation which should lead to new laws being drafted to meet records and information needs in Scotland. In 2008, the Keeper of the Records of

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Scotland was asked to undertake a review of public records legislation and his report was published in October 2009. The Keeper’s conclusion, based on the evidence, was that existing legislation was not fit for purpose: it was seriously out of date, too narrow in scope and simply not relevant to today’s conditions. In 2011 the new Public Records (Scotland) Act was passed. This Act affects named public authorities in Scotland including local authorities, health bodies, police and courts, as well as the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament. They are now obliged to prepare and implement a records management plan (RMP) which sets out proper arrangements for the management of their records. RMPs will be agreed with the Keeper and should be regularly reviewed. Where authorities fail to meet their obligations under the Act, the Keeper has powers to undertake records management reviews and issue action notices for improvement. So, records management in Scotland finally has some teeth and the silences should diminish there. There have not been such positive developments in England and Wales, where central government records management is still largely governed by the 1958 Public Records Act, which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, has allowed the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to conceal the existence of some 20,000 intelligence, security and other files which British colonial officials had sent back to London as colonies were granted independence in the 1950s and 1960s as part of a move that was, ironically, codenamed Operation Legacy. However, there is one chink of light in the darkness. The Hillsborough Independent Panel made one substantive recommendation concerning police records. Currently, most police records in England and Wales are not public records and are not subject to legislative control in any way. The Hillsborough Independent Panel was only able to do its work because the South Yorkshire Police had chosen to preserve their records. Had they made a different decision, then the value of the panel’s work would have been much diminished. The panel recommended that, in future, police records should be covered by the 1958 Public Records Act and thus subject to some degree of official control. As the date of writing, this recommendation has not been implemented. Another positive development in the UK has been the review of the government’s management of its records and archives which was conducted

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by Sir Alex Allan in 2015. Allan stressed the importance of good records management for good government. He said that the government’s policies and guidance are sound but that there were problems with implementation. In particular, he was critical of the failure of existing systems such as electronic document and records management systems which require individuals to identify and save documents that should constitute official records. As a result, almost all departments have a mass of digital data stored on shared drives that is poorly organized and indexed. He described the issues as being: what are the best technologies going forward to ensure that digital information is properly managed in future; and what technologies can help to organize and search existing legacy digital data stored outside Electronic Document and Record Management Systems. He recommended that the Government Digital Service (which is in overall charge of IT in government) and The National Archives should work closely with departments on solutions for records management and for dealing with the legacy of poorly organized digital records. He also noted the need for more research into the problems of digital sensitivity and for high-level support and co-ordination. Since Allan’s report was published, responsibility for records management in government has transferred from The National Archives to the Cabinet Office (2017), which recently published a high-level response to the report stressing the need for government to get better at managing legacy collections and improve the management of current information. Hopefully these words will be translated into actions. In the USA, the US National Archives (2013 and see Chapter 3) has introduced its Capstone policy, which is designed to deal with the problem of selecting e-mails by requiring that the e-mail in-boxes of very senior staff should be selected and preserved. Clearly there are issues with this approach, since it would not necessarily help to secure records relating to individual members of the public who came to the attention of government; it nevertheless is a bold and imaginative attempt to deal with a serious problem. However, there remains one serious threat to openness in archives. Speaking at the 2015 Northumbria University Conference on Threats to Openness in the Digital World, Professor Arthur Lucas, former Principal of King’s College London and a former member of the Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Council on National Records and Archives, made the point that

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while in the UK there is public oversight of the process for releasing official records via the Advisory Council and the Information Commissioner, there is no statutory oversight of the creation, selection or disposition of records. This issue which he described as a democratic deficit in archives remains the largest obstacle to greater openness. Democratic control over these processes would transform the whole archival scene and would guarantee an end to silences. Sadly, at the moment democratization does not appear to be on the agenda and these processes remain in the hands of officials. As this book has shown, archives are full of voluntary or imposed silences – silences which come from the agency of the records creator or the archivist and ones which come from the very nature of records themselves. What is important is that the silences should be recognized by users who should be aware of the limitations of archival records as sources of information. In fact, historians have long recognized that archives are not always what they seem and have come to advocate a closer examination of the social and political conditions that produce records and to ask how those conditions might alter their sense of trust in archived materials. Rather than conceptualizing them as simple, straightforward sites of knowledge, these historians analyse archives as sites of power (Booth, 2006). As Booth argued, the historical profession values, praises and rewards coherent and complete narratives, and consequently, historians are reluctant to incorporate accounts about the recovery, or loss and destruction, of sources, much less to discuss archival silence in their evidence. He said that ‘historians award prizes to complete stories, that is, those that provide answers, solve problems, leave no doubts and present the full truth. Narratives that discuss, or even show an interest in, silences or the circumstances under which archives are assembled and materials excised and excluded, apparently violate the trustworthiness of the discipline’ (Booth, 2006, 98). Central to this sense that all is not well in the archive is postmodernism, which Booth says acted as a catalyst for raising concerns about the way in which history is produced and drew the attention of historians to issues associated with power and truth. Much of the impetus for this way of thinking came from colonial historians, who came to see that what survived in the archive was a function of power relationships in past and future societies; the voice of subordinate groups is excluded from the archive.

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Manoff (2004) said that there are questions about the truth claims of archival material, stemming from the postmodern suspicion of the historical record. Many scholars, whether or not they describe themselves as postmodernists, have come to see the historical record not as an objective representation of the past, but as a selection of objects that have been preserved for a variety of reasons. Whatever the archive contains, it is already a reconstruction, a recording of history from a particular perspective. There is currently a widespread sense that even government records that appear to be a collection of numbers are a reconstruction and interpretation – someone has decided what was worth counting and how to count it. Booth (2006) describes a tension between two groups of historians: On one side stand traditional historians who conceptualize archives as simple, straightforward neutral sites of knowledge with minimal political connotations. On the other side are a group of historians who conceptualize archives as political institutions. This political fault line correlates closely with an epistemological divide. In general, those who understand archives as apolitical institutions tend to display inordinate confidence in the ability of historians to recover and reconstruct the past. By contrast, those who conceptualize archives as political institutions tend to refer to history as fiction rather than an act of discovering the past. (102–3)

However, this view that archives are not the whole truth is not purely the province of postmodernism. The shrewdest and most knowledgeable archivists have always recognized that archives are at best an approximate approach to the truth. Those of us who have worked on medieval or early modern property records know that many of the valuations given in legal records of conveyances are spurious. Our former colleague at The National Archives, Roy Hunnisett (1971, quoted in Prescott, 2008, 37–8) examined the records of six inquests taken by the Warwickshire coroner Robert Waver between 1365 and 1372. He looked at both the file copy and the later copy which was entered onto a formal roll. He found significant discrepancies. In one case, the file recorded that the victim had been stabbed through the heart with a knife called a ‘broche’ and died immediately, whereas the roll said that the wound was inflicted with a baselard and the victim died three days later. He came to the conclusion that it is seldom possible to discover

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how much of the enrolment can be trusted; which jurors and sureties are ghosts, which dates and valuations are genuine and what exactly happened. Hunnisett also noted that in the 16th century, coroners’ inquests began regularly recording that the ‘opprobrious words’ used in mortal struggles were ‘thou art a knave’. He suggested that such a phrase had become a piece of common form – the actual words spoken were probably more imaginative. Basing his views on a detailed study of coroner’s records, Hunnisett came to the conclusion that official records are no more reliable than literary texts ‘and from their haphazard mixture of fact, fiction and error, the complete truth can rarely be distilled’. The distinguished British historian V. H. Galbraith, writing in 1964 (quoted in Prescott, 2008, 47–8) recognized that ‘Records rarely tell the whole truth. Records, in fact can no more be taken at their face value than chronicles . . . it will be found that most records – from Acts of Parliament to balance sheets of public companies and diplomatic notes – have some sort of bias of their own, and seek to conceal the truth or part of it.’ Galbraith also cheerfully acknowledges that all historians are biased in some way. He says the only completely impartial exponent of historical objectivity is the Recording Angel . . . ‘bias is all right so long as you come clean about it’. In reality, silences in archives are inevitable and, in some senses desirable. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995, 50–1) gives the example of what Americans call a play-by-play broadcast of a sports match and what the English would call a live or ball-by-ball commentary. Trouillot says that the broadcaster’s account tends to leave out witnesses, participants and events considered generally as marginal. The audience enters only when it is seen as influencing the players. Players on the bench are left out and players in the field are mentioned mainly when they capture the ball or try to capture it. He says that silences are necessary to the account for if we were told everything that happened at each and every moment, we would not understand anything. Going beyond that, he argues that silences are inherent in the creation of sources, the first moment of historical production. In a lucky play of etymology, he says that census takers are also censors: he who counts heads always silences facts and voices. Equally, Trouillot argues that the movement of documents into archives can have a silencing effect, since archives set the rules for credibility and interdependence and help select the stories that matter. If Trouillot is right, then there will always be archival silences. What is

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important is that the silences are appropriate and properly managed and not the result of political pressure, poor processes or inappropriate use of technology and that they are recognized for what they are. It is also important to recognize that, while archives may be deceptive, elusive and often plain wrong, an understanding of the limitations of the archive gives us a clearer sense of the superficiality of our engagement with the past. Even G. R. Elton (1969, quoted in Prescott, 2008, 34), scourge of the postmodernists and a man who took the phrase Ad fontes as his rallying cry, admitted that history was not the study of the past, but the study of present traces of the past. Perhaps we should leave the last word to David Brin, the American writer of hard science fiction: If only some kind of time-travel or para time-travel were possible, so history could become an observational . . . or even experimental science! Instead we are left to use primitive methods, piercing together clues, sniffing and burrowing in dusty records, hoping the essential story has not been completely lost. Yearning to shed a ray of light on whatever made us who we are. (Brin, 2016, XX)

Notes 1 See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/finding-funding/cataloguinggrants-programme. 2 Virtual Paul’s Cross, see https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu.

References Allan, A. Review of Government Digital Records (2015) www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 486418/Report_-_Digital_Records_Review.pdf. Booth, D. (2006) Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the archive, Sport in History, 26 (01), 91–109. Brin, D. (2016) A Professor at Harvard. Short story in Brin, D., Insistence of Vision, Story Plant, Amazon Kindle edition, location 3754. Cabinet Office (2017) Better Information for Better Government, www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ 584532/2017-01-18_–_Better_Information_for_Better_Government.pdf. Cohen, T. (2009) A Passionate Affair with a Childhood Sweetheart Destroyed

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Two Marriages and Led to the First Friends Reunited Murder, Mail Online, 21 April, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1172192/A-passionate-affairchildhood-sweetheart-destroyed-marriages-led-Friends-Reunited-murder. html#ixzz45oP6xJpA. Darnton, R. (2013) The National Digital Public Library is Launched, New York Review of Books, 25 April. Drucker, J. (2013) Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 7 (1), www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000143/000143.html. Elton, G. R. (1969) The Practice of History, Fontana. Galbraith, V. H. (1964) An Introduction to the Study of History, C. A. Watts. Hunnisett, R. (1971) The Reliability of Inquisitions as Historical Evidence. In Bullough, D. and Storey, R. L. (eds), The Study of Medieval Records: essays in honour of Kathleen Major, Clarendon Press, 206–35. Jeffrey, S. (2012) A new Digital Dark Age? Collaborative web tools, social media and long-term preservation, World Archaeology, 44 (4), 553–70. Leetaru, K. (2015) How Much of the Internet does the Wayback Machine Really Archive?, Forbes Tech, 16 November, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2015/11/16/how-much-of-theinternet-does-the-wayback-machine-really-archive/#202de79d88d4. Liebler, R. and Liebert, J. (2013) Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: the life span of a United States Supreme Court Citation containing an internet link (1996–2010), Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 15 (2/2). Lord Chancellor’s Department (UK) (1981) Modern Public Records: selection and access, Cmnd 8204 (Wilson Committee), HMSO, 32. Manoff, M. (2004) Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4 (1), 9–25. Manoff, M. (2010) Archive and Database as Metaphor: theorizing the historical record, portal: Libraries and the Academy, 10, 385–98. McGee, M. (2011) Google Shuts Down Ambitious Newspaper Scanning Project, Search Engine Land, 20 May, http://searchengineland.com/google-shuts-downambitious-newspaper-scanning-project-77970. McGill, A. (2016) Can Twitter Fit inside the Library of Congress, The Atlantic, 4 August, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/ can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339. Nicholas, D. (2017) How Current and Future Users Will Access Archives: you might not want to know, paper presented to the ‘Is There a Democratic

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Deficit in Archives’ Conference, Northumbria University, 24–25 January. Prescott, A. (2008) The Textuality of the Archive. In Craven, L. (ed.), What are Archives: cultural and theoretical perspectives: a reader, Ashgate, 31–51. Schofield, T., Kirk, D., Amaral, T., Dörk, M., Whitelaw, M., Schofield, G. and Ploetz, T. (2015) Archival Liveness: designing with collections before and during cataloguing and digitization, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 9 (3). Sotteck, T. C. (2015) Twitter’s Decision to Ban Archiving of Politicians’ Deleted Tweets is a Mistake, The Verge, 24 August, www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9198075/twitter-political-transparencydiplowoops-politwoops. The National Archives (2014) Digital Services and Archive Audiences: local authority archives, 2014, 7–8, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/Digital_Services_and_ Archive_Audiences_2014.pdf. Tredinnick, L. (2008) Digital Information Culture: the individual and society in the digital age, Chandos. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995) Silencing the Past: power and the production of history, Beacon Press. US National Archives (2013) Guidance on a New Approach to Managing E-mail Records, NARA Bulletins, Bulletin 2013–02, www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/ bulletins/2013/2013-02.html. Warren, C. et al. (2016) Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: a statistical method for reconstructing large historical social networks, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10 (3). Zimmer, M. (2015) The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: challenges for information practice and information policy, First Monday, 20 (7), 6 July.

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Index

Aboriginal identity 109 Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards 118 absent heritage 105 Acosta, Mercedes de 118 Advisory Council on Public Records/ National Records and Archives (UK) 20, 28, 166, 173 Alhazred, Abdul 121 Allan, Alex xxii, 80, 173 American Declaration of Independence 48 Ancestry Inc. 90–1, 171 archival terminology 72 archival theory 135–6 Archive Team 156 archive users see users Archive-It 85 archives cataloguing, see catalogues collection policies 17–22, 25, 166, 170 definition xx

democratic deficit 174 existential threat 90–3, 167–8 imagined 120–1 incomplete 41–2, 174 neo-archive 120 and power xi, xvi, 3–4, 43, 90, 103, 109, 131, 144, 146, 148, 151, 156, 174 and the powerful xix, 18–19, 22, 30, 34, 43, 55, 58, 103, 131, 143, 145, 166 rehabilitated 131 Archives New Zealand 69, 169 Assange, Julian 95 Association of Research Libraries 75 Aubrey, John 124–5 Australia 29, 32–4 Aboriginal people 109, 118, 171 Find and Connect project 151 lawyers 89–90 Prime Minister 78 series system 148

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Australian Society of Archivists 29 Australian Swimming Union 32 Bacon, Francis 86, 166 banking records 7, 16 BBC Domesday Disks 68 Bentley, Richard 122 Berkeley California 132 births, marriages and deaths registration 49–50 Black and Asian Studies Association 18 black and minority ethnic communities 18–19, 47, 56, 108, 145–6 Blair, Tony 6, 24, 81 Bloodaxe Books 164 book: imaginary 121 Boswell, James 129 British army records 6, 12, 21, 27, 58, 166–7 British Columbia 76 British Library India Office 144 National Life Stories 104 West Africa exhibition 144 Brown, Pete 127 Brown, R. Allen 45 Burney Collection 82, 84 Byng, John 128 Cabinet Office (UK) 75, 81, 173 Cahokia 3 Canada 30–1, 148 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 148 Capstone Policy 81–2, 173

Carnegie Mellon University 85, 86, 166 cartography xx Cary, Anthony 5 Caswell Michelle 117–18 catalogue interfaces, 71–2, 163 catalogues 22, 41, 53–60, 71–3, 84–5, 142, 147–8, 157, 163–5, 171 CD-ROM 27, 67 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 23–4, 169 Chadwyck-Healey 90 child abuse, Shaw inquiry 150, 171 Chowcat, Ian 71, 72, 165 Clinton, Hillary 78, 79, 167 cloud storage 86, 90 Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq) 78 Cobain, Ian 24, 26–8 Collier, John Payne 129–31 Columbia University 85, 166 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada 30–1 community archives 18–19, 146, 149, 155 Conan Doyle, Arthur 83 Cook, Terry 15, 20, 30–1, 135, 142–3, 149–50 Council on Library and Information Resources 67 County Record Offices 11–12, 16, 42 Cyprus 5 Data Protection legislation 76, 152 Davenant, William 124–5 Daymond, John 73–4 declassification 75

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democratic deficit 174 Denham, Elizabeth 76, 79, 81–2, 84 Derrida, Jacques xx diaries 9, 43, 47–8, 83, 127–8 Dickens, Geoffrey 30 digital continuity 69–70 Australia 69 New Zealand 69 Digital Public Library of America 92–3, 170 digital records xxi, 65–115 emulation 67 preservation 65–8 digitization 21–2, 82, 83, 85, 94, 171 documentation 77 Donne, John 166 Drewe, John 121 Duke University 27 Duranti, Luciana 87 EAD 71 Eden, Sir Anthony 8 electronic document management systems 80, 173 Elton, G. R. 177 e-mails 74, 75, 77 Enron 84, 165 episteme xx, 119 Ernst and Young 86 Facebook 86, 89, 143, 169 family history 21–2, 45, 90–3, 164, 171 Federal Records Act (USA) 79 fiction and archives 112, 117–23, 134–5, 175–7 filing systems 80, 84

183

FindMyPast 90, 171 Flower, Sir Cyril 12–13 FoI see Freedom of Information Foreign and Commonwealth Office 5, 27–8, 84, 86, 172 forgery 121–32 meaning of 130–1, 135–7 Former Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal 104 Foucault, Michel xix Fowler, George Herbert 11 France 3–4, 8, 9, 10, 49, 51, 134 Frazer, Dawn 32 Freedom of Information (FoI) 22–6, 29, 66, 75–8, 103, 141–2, 152 Freeman, Arthur and Janet Ing 130, 132 French archives 55, 107 Friends Reunited 171 ‘full moon killer’ 73 Galbraith, V. H. 176 Ganzel, Dewey 130 Garbo, Greta 118 Georgetown University 86 Germany 9, 16, 26, 41–2, 50, 52, 104, 134–5 Gilliland, Anne J. 117–18 Goblin Movies 94 Google 71, 72–3, 84, 89, 170 Google Scholar 71 Gove, Michael 78 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) 26 Greene, Robert 123 Grigg Report (1954) 16–17, 20–1 Griot praise singers 3

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Haitian Revolution 3, 4, 43 Hall, Hubert 10–12 Hancock, Sir William 13 Harris, Verne 2, 3, 10, 14, 102–3, 112–13 Heiner Affair 32–4 Heritage Diversity Task Force 148 Highway of Tears 76 Hillsborough tragedy 132–4, 136–7, 172 historians 174–5 Hitchcock, Tim 83, 85, 94 Hofmann, Mark 121–2 Home Office 16, 30 homosexuals 47 Honigmann, E. A. J. 123 Honohan, Patrick 7, 8 human rights museology 114 humanities research 85–6, 94 Hutton Inquiry 6, 81 Image and Data Manager 78 information technology 79 intelligence records 5, 13, 23, 25–7, 75–6, 172 internet 168, 169 Internet Archive 168, 169 intersectionality 146 Iran 104 Iraq War 78, 81 Ireland, Northern 27–8 Ireland, Republic of 7–8, 91 Ireland, William-Henry 128–9 ISAD(G) 53 Islamic State 89 Jenkinson, Hilary xx, xxi

Johnson, Lyndon B. 23 Kelly, David 81 Kennedy, John F. 118 Kenya 5 Ketelaar, Eric 14–15, 42, 102, 104, 109, 113, 136, 152–3 Key, John 78, 79 Kraus Thomson 90 Law Institute of Victoria 89 Leasor, James 134–5 legal discovery 86 Leningrad xix Lesbian Archive 19 Library of Congress 167, 169–70 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 82 London Commissary Court 2, 48 London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage 148 Lovecraft, H. P. 121 Lucas, Arthur 173–4 Lynch, Clifford 70 Mabillon, Jean 88–9 Madden, Frederic 128–9 maps xix Margaret, Princess 32 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor 84, 94 metadata 69, 75, 79–82, 87–8, 94–5, 164 microfilm 31, 82, 90, 170–1 Middlesex Appeals Tribunal 58 Migrated Archives 4–6 Milosevic, Slobodan 118 Ministry of Defence (UK) 27 Minnesota 76

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mobile devices 71 Mormon faith 122 Moss, John D. 25 Moss, Michael xxii, 80–1, 141–2 National Archives and Records Administration (USA) 78, 81, 118, 167, 173 National Archives (UK) access 28–9 Ancestry.com 92 appraisal 16, 21 Caribbean Histories project 148 catalogue 56, 58, 73, 148, 157, 165 colonial records 5, 56, 148 digital continuity 69 Foreign and Commonwealth Office 27–8, 56 Freedom of Information 25 intelligence records 26–7 slavery records 55 websites 90, 168 National Library of Australia 85 National Records of Scotland 68 Necronomicon 121 New South Wales State Records Office 119 New Zealand, Chief Archivist 78 Prime Minister 79 newspapers online 74, 82, 83, 170 Nicholas, David 71, 89, 165 objectivity historians, 176 role of archivists 146 Open Archival Information System 88

185

Operation Legacy 5, 172 oral history 2–3, 18, 57, 103–4 paper salvage 10–13 Parsons, J. E. R. 43 Perkins Folio 129 Phalaris 122 Pilgrim Trust 165 police records 172 Popular Mechanics 67–8 population registers 51–2 postmodernism 130, 174–5, 177 Powell, Colin 78 Powell, Jonathan 6–7 predictive coding see legal discovery Preservation Metadata Maintenance Activity 88 private papers 9, 43 Public Archives of Canada 31 Public Interest Declassification Board (USA) 75–6 Public Record Office (PRO) see National Archives (UK) Public Records Act (UK) 16, 28, 172 Public Records (Scotland) Act 171–2 Public Services Quality Group 91 Quilliam Foundation 89 Race, Sydney 131 Rauceby Hospital 56–7 Reading Experience Database 83 records access 75 appraisal 2, 14–17, 20–2, 31, 56–7, 142–5, 149–50, 154, 166, 171, 174–5

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records (continued) authenticity 87–9 closure 13, 28–9, 142 ‘datafication’ 165 definition xxi destruction 10–16, 27, 29–34, 56, 75–6, 110, 135–6, 152, 156, 174 as evidence x, xxi, 2, 3, 17, 22, 29, 31, 56, 101–2, 106, 113, 118–19, 130–6, 142 management 16–17, 28–30, 34, 80, 171–3 online 166 proactive release 76 provenance 53–4, 56, 60, 88, 130, 135, 145–6, 149, 155 sampling 20–1, 156, 166 selection see records, appraisal volume 74, 84, 85–6, 165 Revels Accounts 131 Reynold’s Newspaper 82 Rochester, Minnesota 76 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 9 Roswell 121 Rothenberg, Jeff 67–8 Rowe, Nicholas 125 royal family (UK) 32 Samuel, Raphael 42 Sary, Ieng 118 Schumacher, E. F. xix, xx Scientific American 67 Scotland 171–2 search 72 secrecy 8, 10, 22–9, 89, 142 Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) 13, 26

security classification 75 Security Service (MI5) 13, 26 sense-making 86, 108, 157 sensitivity 5, 9, 29, 32, 65–6, 75–6, 87, 173 Shakespeare, William, archive 123 deer poaching 125 favourite pub 127 imagined life 124–6 Italian connection 126 life 122–4 schoolmaster 125–6 will 124 Shreddergate see Heiner Affair slavery 119–20 Smith, Joseph 122 South Africa 3, 10, 14, 47, 102, 107, 142 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 3, 10, 102, 104, 112, 148 Special Operations Executive 13 speech act theory 104 St Albans Abbey x St Paul, Minnesota 76 Stasi 42, 104, 152 State Department (USA) 78 Stevenson, R.L. 83 Stoler, Ann 4 Suez Crisis (1956) 8, 106 Supreme Court (USA) 168 Swedish National Audit Office 78 Syria 76 Themail 85 Tobago 55

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INDEX

Torabully, Khal 120 Trouillot, Michel-Rolfe xxi, 1, 3,4, 43, 176 Trove 57, 85 Trump, Donald 169 trust 174 Twitter 86, 89, 153, 169 UFOs 121 UK Prime Minister 78 United States Patriot Act 2001 25 University Microfilms (now Proquest) 90 University of Maryland 70 Unix 68 user behaviour 90–2, 110, 171 needs and expectations 17–18, 48–9, 54, 56, 59, 87, 153–4, 174 participation 11, 29, 65–6, 70, 85, 149–53, 171 users, future generation 71, 90, 92, 157, 164 see also catalogues Veritas Technologies 74 Vichy regime 9, 10 Victoria, Queen of England 32

187

Virtual Paul’s Cross 165 visualization 85 Walsingham, Thomas x, xi Wanless and Whittam Inquiry (2014) 30 war 9–10, 16 Cold War 23, 26 Nuremberg Tribunal 45, 104, 109 World War I xxii, 10–13, 18, 21, 51, 58, 166–7 World War II 10, 12, 43, 55, 104 websites 55, 57, 59, 90, 92, 155–6, 168, 171 WikiLeaks 84, 103, 153, 165, 167 Wilson Committee (1980) 17, 20 women 18–19, 46–7, 107–8, 120, 145–6 Women’s Work Collection, Imperial War Museum 18 World Bank 79, 83 Yeo, Geoffrey xxi, 54–9, 71, 132, 148–9 Zepa (Bosnia) 120 Zinn, Howard 19

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Also available from Facet Publishing Engaging with Records and Archives Histories and theories Edited by FIORELLA FOSCARINI, HEATHER MACNEIL, BONNIE MAK and GILLIAN OLIVER

This collection provides a multifaceted response to today’s growing fascination with the idea of the archive and showcases the myriad ways in which archival ideas and practices are being engaged with and developed by emerging and internationally renowned scholars. The contributions comprise a wide variety of views of records, archives and archival functions, spanning diverse regions, communities, disciplinary perspectives and time periods. The volume reveals the richness of archival thinking through compelling examples from past and present that will captivate the reader. Nov 2016 | 256pp | Pb | 9781783301584 | £59.95

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Later in 2017 . . . Archives, 2nd edition Principles and practices LAURA A MILLAR

This updated edition offers an international perspective on archives management, providing guidance relevant both to collections-based repositories and to organizations responsible for managing their own institutional archives. Review from the previous edition: "...an excellent guide to principles and practices for archive management around the globe." - Library Review May 2017 | 304pp | Pb | 9781783302062 | £49.95

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Later in 2017 . . . Records, Information and Data GEOFFREY YEO

This dynamic book considers whether and how the management of records (and archives) differs from the management of information (and data). Can archives and records management still make a distinctive contribution in the 21st century, or are they now being dissolved into a wider world of information governance? What should be our conceptual understanding of records in the digital era? What are the practical implications of the information revolution for the work of archivists and records managers? Geoffrey Yeo, a distinguished expert in the global field, explores concepts of ‘records’ and ‘archives’ and sets today’s record-keeping and archival practices in their historical context. Dec 2017 | 224pp | Pb | 9781783302260 | £59.95