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Extremes: Archives at the Edge
On October 1, 2001 Dr. Terry Cook delivered an inspiring post-luncheon speech to a group of archivists and librarians. We feel it deserves a wider audience and reproduce it her with Terry's permission. (Editor)
Good afternoon, and thanks for coming today to help celebrate Archives Week 2001 in this beautiful heritage surrounding. I've always admired from afar the activism and high profile of the Archives Society of Alberta and so I'm very pleased to be here with you. And I'm pleased too that some other heritage professions have joined us today and especially Sandra Thompson. I want to thank Michael Gourlie especially, and Jo-Anne Munn Gafuik, Linda Fraser, and Dave Leonard for their various kindnesses in making my arrangements, and for the invitation today.
I'm delighted to be back on the campus of the University of Alberta where I did my undergraduate degree, and where I well recall the struggles to preserve the Rutherford House from the wrecking ball. Alexander Cameron Rutherford was more than just the first premier of Alberta, a respected lawyer, and the long-time Chancellor of the University. He and I share a personal, if somewhat tenuous, connection. Rutherford was born in Carleton County, Ontario, where my home is located, and I in turn spent many hundreds of pleasurable hours in "his" other home, the Rutherford Library. Indeed, his superb private collection of Canadiana was donated by him to form the basis of the Library's collection, and no doubt as a history undergraduate I read scores of books that had been in his very hands.
As premier of Alberta, Rutherford was especially interested in communications: he pioneered the building of the first provincial railway and telephone networks in Alberta, as well as establishing the public school system, and founding this University. Communication, information sharing, education, Canadiana, and heritage: it sounds like we archivists and other heritage professionals lunching in Rutherford House are in a friendly place for Archives Week as we move forward as a profession to share our Canadian archival heritage through a national network.
We should recognize that with the Canadian Archival Information Network, we are creating, in the virtual world, the same kind of networks as did others before us with canals and transcontinental railways in the nineteenth century, or the Trans-Canada Highway, radio and television broadcasting networks, and airports and air travel in the twentieth century. All these networks, including CAIN, help unite nations, communities and peoples together with common ideas and through linked activities. Humans need to communicate as much with their past, through virtual archival networks, as they need to communicate with other cities and companies via more traditional physical networks. It is not an unworthy mission for the profession to celebrate in 2001, and I cannot help but think that the former owner of this House would approve of our networking endeavours!
But I'm not here for my 20 minutes that Michael allotted me to discuss Premier Rutherford or the wonders of CAIN. The ASA theme for Archives Week this year is "extremes," and Michael said that I could talk about anything I wanted under this rubric with appropriate luncheon speech generalities and gung-ho inspiration.
So, what do we mean by extremes? I thought immediately of the extreme sports that are now so popular, of playing at the edge, taking your life in your hands, pushing the limits, all to test one's personal endurance and inner character. The Oxford English Dictionary certainly supports this perspective, offering such phrases to define "extreme" as intense, utmost degree, exceedingly great, outermost, furthest from the center, occupying a radical position at the far left or far right of a party or ideology. More negatively, there is the connotation for "extreme" of severe, stringent, lacking restraint or moderation, advocating drastic measures or holding immoderate opinions.
All this made me wonder for a moment "What kind of people are you archivists out here in Alberta?!" This is your theme for celebrating Archives Week? And what does any of this daring extremity have to do with the archivist, that kindly professional still caricatured as the stooping curator pouring over old ledgers, in dusty basements of course, understood -- if at all -- as some sort of specialized librarian or maybe some kind of cross between an antiquarian and an historian, cataloguing lovingly old stuff from a distant past? What is extreme about that? Except maybe wondering why someone would ever want to do such work? If archivists living on the edge, with intensity, lacking restraint, testing themselves, pushing the limits, where could that space possibly be?
Let me suggest that space is a metaphoric one, relating to the extreme or radical transformation of the archival profession over the past decade or so. Public perceptions of archives are changing, as my Oxford Dictionary puts it, to the utmost degree. The U.S. News and World Report identifies archives as one of the ten "hottest" career fields for the opening years of the new century. Imagine, even ten years ago, archives as a hot field! Popular articles on archives and archivists have appeared in very recent years in Technology Review, The New York Times, Scientific American, The New Yorker, and here in Canada last year in Saturday Night. These usually cast archivists as essential guardians of society's memories and archival ideas about good electronic record-keeping being the key to preventing social chaos that will surely come from collective amnesia threatening our computerized age. PBS Television produced an hour-long special on preserving the electronic record -- which I found archivists in Lisbon eagerly watching on their lunch hour huddled around a television set with a dubbed Portuguese version.
In this regard, what, my friends, beyond the loss of thousands of lives, could be more extreme, archivally, than the sad spectacle of millions of pages of records littering the streets of New York after September 11th, or the subsequent highlighting of the critical role of effective disaster planning for backed-up records in reestablishing the destroyed businesses' operations? Stories about archives and records fill the press and increasingly are the focus of court challenges: think in Canada of Somalia, the HIV Blood scandal, residential schools, Nazi war criminals, or the Walkerton water inquiry. Think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report in South Africa with its significant focus on archives, and on illegal records destruction by the apartheid government to avoid accountability for its actions. Think of the Shreddergate debates in Australia. Think of Archives being deliberately bombed in Bosnia to efface a people's memories.
The Association of Canadian Archivists has presented briefs and testified before the Canadian Parliament on new legislation governing extending personal privacy protection to records in the private sector and electronic records encryption proposed for electronic commerce records, as well as on revisions to copyright and access legislation, which is reflective of a growing public advocacy role increasingly familiar for archivists and public policy concern in society and governments for information management issues. And perhaps the greatest living philosopher in the world today, Jacques Derrida, turned to exploring archives and memories in his recent book, Archive Fever -- he also invited South Africa to speak in several cities about memory and forgetting, in light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In turn, many scholars in many disciplines are now looking at the archive not as a source of documents for research, but as a subject of study in how society constructs, mediates, and destroys the past, for whom, and why. To paraphrase the Buffalo Springfield from the 1960's -- see I was there -- "something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear . . ." What is clear is that this "happening" is an extreme departure from the comfortable custodial world of the archival stereotype of dusty basements and old stuff, and that we as a profession are going to have to push ourselves to extreme limits in order to flourish in this new world.
Am I adopting an extreme position now if I say that the archival enterprise must change from its past sureties of only looking after physical artifacts in fixed places according to traditional and long-defended theory and principles, although of course it will continue to do that in some places and for some records, and, rather, begin to view archival thinking and resulting practice over the past centuries, and especially from here on into the new century, as concepts that are constantly evolving, ever mutating, continually adapting, because of radical changes in the nature of records, record-creating organizations and organizational and work culture, in record-keeping systems, record uses, and the wider cultural, legal, technological, social, and philosophical trends in society? Is it extreme to suggest then that archivists need to be able to recognize, research and articulate these radical changes in society and then deal conceptually with their impact on archival strategies and practice? Is dealing with such radical change perhaps our extreme sport as a profession?
I want to stress the nature of the playing field for our extreme sport, in which you will be participating for the rest of your archival careers. The electronic records medium and its related computer technologies are just on the cusp of really taking off into their own. Let me explain. Most technologies during their first generation, which may last a few years or decades or even a century or more, pattern themselves initially on the preceding technology that they are replacing or extending. Think of the early automobiles: they truly were horseless carriages: square-shaped like wagons, the driver sitting at the front edge, open-aired, hand-brake on the side. Only later designs -- technical and aesthetic -- turned the car into something quite different.
Take another example of early films as a nickel-odeon series of fast-moving photographs, and later as defacto staged plays or musical performances taking place before a fixed, stationery camera -- these you will remember were called "motion pictures" before they were later labeled as movies, film, or cinema. Only later with the advent of moving and hand-held cameras, special effects, and new lighting, animation, and editing techniques did this new medium truly come into its own, and become something radically different from its predecessors.
Similarly with the advent of printing and the invention of the printed book: early books resembled for many years the hand-illuminated and hand-written manuscripts that preceded them. The lay-out was the same: large illustrated initial letters began pages and chapters in the same way, and printed books were first seen as merely an efficient means of duplication and distribution of what went before. Only later were page numbers added to these printed manuscripts, which then allowed still later for indexes to be added, and still later for footnotes or other citations, and still later the idea of serials or journals, by which time the printed book was transformed into something quite different from its hand-written predecessors.
One can make the same point about the transformation, in the late middle ages in England, from oral to written culture, and from oral to written records, but today I want to emphasize the same mirroring of earlier technologies in the evolution of electronic records. Until the late 1980's, some of you will recall that these were called machine-readable records, implying that they were traditional records simply adapted for more efficient machine reading and machine sorting and machine tabulating. If books were at first fast and efficient means of duplicating and distributing hand-written manuscripts, early mainframe computers were seen as fast calculators, efficient ways of computing numbers and producing outputs that previously had required hundred or thousands of clerks to accomplish.
Similarly, less than fifteen years ago, desktop computers were widely introduced into offices as "fast typewriters," efficient ways of producing and manipulating text which then was printed to paper to form the official record, and to conduct the real business of the organization and communication with its clients. The terminology used for our computers reflects this look backwards to the predecessor paper world: words like desktops, files, and windows; icons depicting little paper file folders and little trash cans; functions like cutting and pasting, all reflect the processes and terminologies of the earlier paper office they are supplanting rather than what is happening inside the technology.
And yet the situation is now changing: computers are not just used as machines to produce paper-based or paper-analogous products in a fast and efficient way as a support to or resource for core business processes. Rather, they are now increasingly part of and integral to those main-line business processes; they store and maintain records often not printed to paper, and they are ubiquitous to most workers rather than treated as special media and the purview of information technology specialists. People now, in the first instance, do their work on these machines rather than getting either paper products or computed results as printouts from them.
The records themselves are changing, from electronic versions of discrete paper equivalents, whether letters, reports, forms, message slips, graphic designs, charts, or tables or of visual and sound media, whether photographs, film, and sound recordings, to becoming compound or multimedia documents that combine and increasingly integrate two or more of these discrete media. And the internet technology of the world wide web, where interactive multimedia sites are the norm, has also been transformed in its short history form a means of distribution and publication and publicity, although it remains that to be sure, to a means for electronic commercial transactions and, through intranets and extranets, a core means of doing business within and between institutions. And all these newer electronic technologies produce recorded information, increasingly without useful or any paper equivalents, and all such information requires intense, indeed, extreme records management and archival attention as this maturing technology acquires its own power and possibilities. I wrote a decade ago that bringing paper minds to electronic problems would utterly fail. So would clinging to our traditional custodial mentality. We have to be daring -- dropping the analogies with the past and willing to live on the new edge.
Speaking of living at the edge, I truly believe that we stand at the edge of a revolution that will shake human society no less than did the earlier movements from oral to written records and from hand-written to print culture, both of which, as you all know, have had profound impacts on every dimension of human existence. The printing press was commonly cited in various "millennial 2000 lists" as the most important or one of the most important, inventions of the previous thousand years in terms of its fundamental impact on society. In fact, the computer revolution, some have asserted, already exceeds the impact of the previous two information revolutions from oral-to-written and hand-to-printed cultures, in terms if its global social influence, in a tiny fraction of the time they both took, and that this new revolution in which we are living is only really beginning.
As society now moves from printed and paper-based text culture to visual and computer literacies and from physical artifacts to virtual multimedia documents, you have the wonderful opportunity to participate directly in one of the greatest revolutions of human history. In your lifetimes, electronic records, just like automobiles, motion pictures, and books before them, will move firmly out of their first generation status of imitating their predecessor technologies and really start to come into their own. That process has already started, I think, with multimedia and web technologies, and no one knows where it is going nor can anyone foresee its results, for good or ill. This sense of revolutionary transformation, in which archival insights will have a central role, perhaps help explain why some observers see ours as one of the "hottest" professions in the new century.
As society shifted a thousand years ago from the oral to the written record, the focus of archivists then also shifted from remembering the action to caring for the written artifact that gave evidence of the action. As society now shifts with a new millennium from fixed written records to virtual documents, archivists need to change their focus again, this time from those physical recorded artifacts to the functions and activities, and related records-creating processes and cultures, that animate those artifacts. If we can so reorient our own key activities of appraisal and description and if we can convince others to adopt our provenance-based insights into the structure and functional context of recorded evidence to build reliable record-keeping systems and metadata, then I believe we can as a society can combat the widespread amnesia now threatening our collective memory in an electronic world. That is our greatest challenge, but also our greatest opportunity to make a real difference for society in our time. This, my friends, is our extreme sport out there on the edge; let's resolve during Archives Week to play it well. Thank you.
by
Terry Cook
Visiting Professor
Master's Program in Archival Studies
University of Manitoba
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