Minds Alive by Patricia A. Demers

Author:Patricia A. Demers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Changes within (and outside) the Archival Community

A lot has happened over the past thirty years. Many of the changes we have witnessed have challenged the notion of a profession, namely the immersion into the digital era; the growth of Indigenous populations and other communities in caring for their documentary heritage; the emergence of social justice and ethical practices as primary components of the archival mission; the appearance of the citizen archivist as a potential equal partner with other archivists; the increasing depth and expanding breadth of archival education and research; and the constitution of new archival fields. In my estimation, these and other developments have transformed how archivists think of themselves as professionals and how others see them. We are a very different profession.

As digital information technologies took hold, archivists grappled with the issues they posed. They wondered if the basis of their knowledge, fabricated in the analogue world, was being undermined or even obliterated. There was also increasing speculation that there would be a convergence of various information professions (librarianship, archivy, records management, knowledge management, and museum curation) into something new, even if it was unclear what that would be (see Myburgh). Obviously these interests in and predictions about convergence continue, as others in this volume, such as Edwards, suggest. All of these fields shared a common interest in the “document” and its importance in providing information, evidence, memory, and accountability – even if the definition of document was becoming much broader.2 The result was a blurring of any distinctive qualities of what we have normally associated with a profession. Whereas only a generation or two before archivists had focused on the distinctive aspects that separated them from other information professionals and related fields like historical and cultural studies, now they looked for what melded them together, and, in this case, it seemed to be the growth in ever more powerful and ubiquitous information technologies. Some of these issues and questions remain unresolved.

We are witnessing a new attentiveness to the value of archives in our digital world, an interest that seems to be unabashedly sympathetic, even nostalgic, in how it perceives old documents.3 Technologists seem intent on assuring us that nothing will be lost in our digital world, even going so far as to suggest that the new digital systems will enable us to preserve in better ways traditional paper records, or to save everything that is created (see Morozov, To). How are various scholars and pundits writing about documents and archives, seeming to affirm that the more romantic interests in archives remain valid even as we struggle with enormous technical challenges such as represented in the debates about big data and digital stewardship? Archives ground us in both time and place, supporting our self-awareness and identity. The new technologies, even with their networking emphasis, threaten to tear us apart, and this has profound consequences for how we perceive ourselves as professionals and what we offer society.

One of the assumed features of recordkeeping and information management was control (see Beniger, Yates).

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