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Archivists Facing the Millennium: Preparing for an Unknown—but not Unknowable—Future
by NICHOLAS C. BURCKEL, Director of Libraries, Marquette
University
52nd president of the Society of American Archivists
The following address was delivered on August 31, 1996, during SAA's 60th
annual meeting in San Diego, CA, Sheraton Hotel & Marina.
Many of us at middle age and beyond, buffeted by constant change, may be inclined
to long wistfully for the "good old days." But the good old days
were "good" only for some.
In the 1950s women were confined to the home, African-Americans to the back
of the bus, Native Americans to the reservation, gays to the closet, and disabled
to hospitals or institutions. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus reminded
us 2,500 years ago that the only constant is change. So why the anxiety over
change? Hasn't it always been part of our lives? Hasn't it been the basis for
a better life? Aren't we better educated, healthier, longer lived, and wealthier
than past generations? The cause of our anxiety, in part, must be the rapidity
of change and the increasing number of variables that cause it. Are we affecting
the changes or affected by them?
The common, but inaccurate, stereotype of archivists is of wizened old folks
dealing with even older paper documents. Our professional experience is otherwise,
but our image probably suggests stability, a safe haven from the changes discombobulating
others. In fact, technology and the pace of change are forcing us as a profession
to reexamine our traditional role as guardians of history. The debate is not
new, but it has intensified. Clark Elliott of Harvard noted in 1990 (American
Archivist 53:3, p. 377) that it is a battle of fundamentals:
On the one hand, we can look deeply within ourselves, ask what our very special
purpose is in society, reassert our traditional ties to scholarship, and choose
historical understanding as our goal. On the other hand, we can chart the currents
around us, look to sources of funding, unshackle ourselves from the discipline
of history, and seek the way of power through the networks of information access.
Elliott notes that we need both for the profession, but his emphasis is on
the former. Page Miller and David Thelen echoed this theme three years later
in The Chronicle of Higher Education (December 8, 1993), observing, "The
emergence in the 1960s of archival-education programs in graduate schools,
along with the recent dramatic technological changes in record-keeping practices,
have continued to shift the archival profession away from history and toward
information management."
Changes Within the Profession
As one who has been an historian, archivist, librarian, and academic administrator,
I am less certain than some of my historian colleagues that the archival role
should not change. The boundaries of traditional research disciplines are blurring
as new interdisciplinary programs yield rich new knowledge. Evolutionary economics,
for instance, suggests that it is not Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that
explains economic patterns, but rather biologically based behaviors. Behavioral
scientists have borrowed from economists the theory of rational expectations
to explain more than economic decisions. Just as history is no longer exclusively
political and diplomatic, archives is no longer accessioning, arranging, and
describing paper records. Indeed, James O'Toole has challenged some of our
cherished ideas of uniqueness and permanence that for generations have defined
our sense of what is archival. Legislation and court decisions have had a major
impact on the archival role. Some have even facetiously referred to U.S. District
Court Judge Charles Richey as the de facto Archivist of the United
States.
The incredible growth of higher education in the 1960s and '70s dramatically
increased the number of archivists and archives, leading to the prominent role
of college and university archivists in SAA, ACA, and regional archival associations.
The apparent reluctance of history departments to stake an early claim to leadership
in archival education has meant that most formal archival education programs
are housed within schools of library and information science and taught by
faculty of those schools, not by faculty in the department of history.
The drive toward machine-readable bibliographic control over published information
pioneered by Henriette Avrum at the Library of Congress has resulted in the
MARC standard as the umbrella under which other types of information, including
archives and manuscripts, are being described. The emergence of the Ohio College
Library Center into the Online Computer Library Catalog containing more than
34 million bibliographic records and nearly 600 million holdings has brought
a further degree of standardization to information access, standardization
that archivists thought infeasible 30 years ago.
Admittedly, these changes are accompanied by risk, uncertainty, and concern.
William Jones of the University of Illinois at Chicago stated the case succinctly:
"The atomization, democratization, and digitization of texts, the erosion
of the canon, the fluidity of language, and the transformation of the practices
of scholarship all point to a world in which access to the scholarly record
is at risk; the bibliographic apparatus of retrieval still cannot function
at the level of detail required. The replacement and suppression of print records
by electronic records in no way minimizes that risk. The tumultuous babble
of the Internet only expands and intensifies it."
Material is already coming to the archives in electronic form. At the same
time, use of archival records for purely historical research is diminishing.
Increasingly more recent archival material will be sought, and that material
will be in electronic form. The ideal in this information-intensive environment
is that relevant information is available to users when and where they need
it and in the format they need it. I purposely distinguish between "need" and "want." As
the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger aptly vocalized, "You can't always get
what you want, but if you try sometimes, you will find you can get what you
need." "Relevant information" means not simply access to undigested
information, but rather to that portion of available documentation especially
needed by the user--student, historian, citizen or genealogist. Also users
will more often seek a specific bit of information, and will be less interested
in entire documents or the larger context or provenance of the documents from
which the particular piece of information is extracted. "Available when
and where they need it" means access any time (day or night) from any
location--office, home, or away; "in the format they need it" means
not only paper or electronic--audio, video, computer--but also compatible with
the researcher's equipment. Major archival functions--appraisal, arrangement
and description, reference, preservation--may not change, although the way
those functions are practiced, will. What is changing is the delivery of services--reducing
the physical constraints of time and place.
If we look only at "inputs"--size of staff, number of collections,
space for the collections, amount of budget--then we are likely to miss this
transformation. We need to look at outputs. Outputs include the provision of
satisfactory services, defined from the user perspective. Automation is moving
from technical processing to delivery of services. In an archival setting,
that means providing access to needed information quickly. It will soon also
mean "anytime" and "from any location," not requiring a
physical visit to the archives when it is open for on-site use. Archives that
do not respond to user pressure will lose budgetary support, as resources shift
to areas that are more responsive to user-driven demands.
This will not come quickly, but already the infrastructure is being created
to facilitate it. Archivists' adoption of the MARC AMC format was an important
first step in
assuring compatibility with such a future. Computer hardware costs are declining
as their power is increasing and there are no clear signs that these trends
are likely to abate. Breakthroughs in computing and telecommunications make
possible the transmission of an incredible amount of information at speeds
approaching a billion bits (or a gigabit) per second. The United States is
taking a major step in transforming the Internet into an electronic highway
as significant in scope and as important in consequences for communications
as our interstate highway has proven to be for transportation. As the computing
industry matures and moves away from proprietary systems and toward open systems
architecture, industry standards are becoming more important because they insure
product compatibility. These standards evolve de facto from market conditions
or as a result of agreement among manufacturers and users, such as those developed
by the National Information Standards Organization, of which SAA is a member.
Technology is thus making possible a future we might once have only dreamed
of--instant access. It is up to us archivists to find a way to harness that
technology to help users be more informed. In the process, however, we will
not merely automate what we currently do, we will do things differently, and
it is that change that presents the greatest challenge. It also means that
we will give up some of our autonomy in exchange for a role in the larger transformation
of information management.
As archivists move more into information management and science, they will
encounter more engineers, computer scientists, and business personnel. It remains
to be seen if the latter will control the future of information management
or if the professions will integrate, if not merge. That will also shape the
role of archivists--either as observers or implementers of new systems in the
former scenario or designers or shapers of it in the latter.
In the coming decade we will need to attract to the profession staff that
are increasingly comfortable with technology, rapid change, and the larger
information environment in which archives exist. The half-life for job skill
at the current pace of change, we are told, is five years. One might expect
that with the ubiquity of computers and the accelerated pace of change the
Nintendo generation with its iconographic, rather than text, orientation will
be ready. We should thus not worry about having enough available talent. More
sobering, however, is the recognition that our graduate schools in science
and engineering are being filled by foreign students, most of whom do not become
a permanent part of our work force. Thus, the competition for information professionals
will be intense. Archivists will have to grow their own--meaning more continuing
education and additional course work--in order to assure that archival materials
are collected, preserved, used, and understood.
As we enter this increasingly complex technical environment we know that we
will need to learn more about the mechanics of document creation, storage,
and transmission than were required in a paper-based environment. My generation
of archivists will have to learn this, just as they had to learn the importance
of content and context when they entered the profession. The newer generation
of archivists, recruited from a much broader background than history majors,
will likely come with a greater knowledge of computer applications, but they
will have to learn about content and context. Futurists tell us that we will
have voice-responsive "intelligent machines" on our desk tops that
will not require sophisticated training to exploit fully. Certainly software
has become more user friendly; even VCRs can be programmed by voice command.
If that trend continues, it may swing the emphasis back to the history-based
training and education of the pre-1980s, but I am doubtful.
How do we adapt to and shape these changes? First, we need the will to transform
ourselves--to change in order not merely to survive, but to prevail. That means
a willingness to take risks. Relying on arguments about the size of unprocessed
backlogs as the justification for more staff is no longer persuasive to administrators.
We need a different approach, one that justifies support based on our institutions'
mission and goals. Archivists cannot rely on bland, if true, statements about
preserving our documentary heritage. How does such work further the institution's
priorities? The answer for one institution will not be the same as for another.
Beyond the will to change how we seek support, we need to make the internal
adjustments to make such appeals credible. That means finding out what our
users need, rather than what we think they need. It means being willing to
alter practice in light of those needs. Should we allow access to unprocessed
collections? Do we need to document all aspects of the institution? What are
the consequences of not doing some things? Will anyone notice? Will anyone
care now or later?
Archivists, by education, training, and experience, have an important contribution
to make in the development and integration of information management in an
information society. That contribution will only influence larger issues if
archivists are well-informed about those issues and actively work to include
them in their planning. We can't retreat into omphaloskepsis--navel
gazing. As long as we look at participation in institutional and professional
activities as distractions from our real work of acquiring and processing collections,
we will remain isolated and will not influence the direction of change. Rather
than eschew such opportunities, we should both seek and embrace them. As Harvard
Business Review editor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, has noted, "In the
future, those who lack the mental flexibility to think across boundaries will
find it increasingly difficult to hold their own, let alone prosper." It
is no longer adequate to do well what we have done in the past; we need to
do new things. If not, we will become marginalized--we will be the carriage
and harness maker in the age of the automobile; the lamp-lighter in an electric
world; the pen-and-paper writer in an electronic age.
The quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest that adorns the National
Archives Building--"Past is Prologue"--suggests the past is merely
a preliminary discussion or introduction to something that follows. It suggests
neither the past as predictor nor the past as future. Because our archival
profession owes a significant debt to the historical profession does not mean
we must continue with that single minded allegiance. We deal not only with
material that is already historical, but with the creation and retention of
material that will become so. We are not merely the passive recipients of past
significant recorded activity. Rather we need to be actively engaged in assuring
such a record will be created, that it will be properly preserved, that it
will be adequately arranged and described, and that it will be widely available
for all users.
Role for Archivists
For that to happen, archivists must increasingly look beyond the traditional
boundaries of their profession and their association. In the past, archivists
needed to know less and could operate within the borders of the historical
profession. Now they must know about myriad preservation treatments, electronic
applications, cataloging standards, and legal rulings. An advanced degree in
history is no longer the main access for admission to the field. Archival education
and certification must necessarily recognize the importance of historical analysis,
but they can no longer rely on it as governing. Similarly, for SAA to influence
the wider information world in which we live, we can neither cling exclusively
to our historical roots, nor assert our independence from all other organizations
with similar or overlapping interests.
In our society technology has shrunk geography, increased the speed of information
transfer, and correspondingly rewarded organizations that can act quickly.
In legislative matters archivists are sometimes seen as an interest group to
be appeased at best or disregarded as unimportant at worst. Our future rests
with our ability to connect to issues and our willingness to cooperate and
collaborate with others. There is clearly risk in this approach. We cannot
withdraw from the hurley-burley of politics with a declaration of "A plague
on both your houses." We cannot expect that our perspective will be fully
shared with our coalition partners. We will have to compromise some things
in order to influence others. We need to suppress personal, institutional,
and organizational egos in order to achieve substantive results. We need to
find a common language and value, rather than assert our differences. We cannot
expect to avoid the implications of actions in other areas. Educational institutions
are establishing consortia, information intensive organizations are developing
coalitions, and information-based corporations are forming strategic partnerships.
Why? Because they recognize that individually they cannot achieve as much as
they can together.
Changes within SAA
As we look outward to link with allied professional organizations, we need,
like the roman god Janus, to look a second way inward to the society. I hope
that by the conclusion of my presidency we will have agreed to a new way of
doing business, a more timely way of communicating our ideas, and a greater
understanding of the transformation of the archival enterprise in our information
age.
1. This year we are examining how to improve the effectiveness of SAA. Since
the constitution and bylaws were written SAA and its national office have
grown, means for communication have changed, and the number of organizational
units within SAA has increased. Luciana Duranti and Margaret Hedstrom are
leading a task force with the charge to simplify our governance structure,
to clarify responsibilities and relationships among various organizational
units, and to identify which units are needed to accomplish the Society's
objectives. That task force is wrestling with the potentially conflicting
principles of democracy and efficiency. How can SAA retain its democratic
values without a crippling organizational structure that inhibits fast and
flexible responses to member needs and to external challenges and opportunities?
These issues will be discussed in Council, on the listserve, in Archival
Outlook, and at regional archival meetings. We will have an opportunity
to vote on these changes when next we meet in Chicago.
2. Helen Tibbo recently has chaired another task force, this one dealing
with the American Archivist. We know that our members rate SAA publications
as a very important membership benefit. We also know that despite the best
efforts of editors, their boards, and SAA staff, we have not been able to
publish the journal on a regular basis. The task force addressed the question: "Is
the American Archivist in its present form meeting the information needs
of the membership? If yes, how do we assure its quantity and quality? If
not, what changes would meet those needs?" Is the traditional scholarly
journal of quarterly issues printed on paper and distributed through the
mails still the best way to serve our members? Can we continue to spend nearly
$100,000 a year for it? The wide availability of other Society publications,
workshops, and regional meetings and journals did not exist even 25 years
ago. Our willingness to re-examine how we meet the information needs of our
members is important, even if it serves to reconfirm what we are doing. You
will hear more of this in the coming months.
Marie Allen and the Program Committee for our 97 annual meeting are already
seeking your ideas for next year. It is my hope that many of those sessions
will explore diversity. Hilary Kaplan, Bill Wallach, and this year's program
committee brought us a marvelous program highlighting aspects of ethnic and
cultural diversity. Next year's program can extend that exploration by examining
diversity from a different perspective--the diversity of training needs, the
diversity of society's information needs and of the information professionals
who serve those needs, and the diversity of issues that archivists must address
in their jobs. The committee is already hard at work on an ambitious series
of sessions addressing the "transformation of the archival enterprise." It
promises to be a stimulating program.
Having just seen a national political party convention in San Diego and watching
the Democrats this week, I am reminded of Will Rogers' wry comment that "campaign
platforms are like train platforms--they're for getting in on, not standing
on." I hope that is not true for your Society's elected leadership. When
I stood for election more than a year ago, I said that I hoped to focus on
two of the Society's main goals--building effective coalitions and addressing
the transformation of our work as a result of the creation of electronic records.
I am happy to see that our new vice president, Bill Maher, also addressed the
Society's need to build new and strengthen existing coalitions, networks, and
liaisons. We also agree that we need to resolve governance and organizational
issues that make timely action difficult.
As we conclude the SAA's 60th anniversary celebration and look to a new century,
we can be sure of the inevitability of change. The Chinese symbol for change
suggests both opportunity and danger. We cannot control which it will be, but
we can influence the outcome. But we can only have influence if we participate,
if we link with our sister organizations, and accept practical, but partial
gains. I am optimistic that issues important to archivists will become increasingly
important to our larger information-intensive society. As that happens, we
have an opportunity to make a significant contribution. Let's be prepared.
Thank you.
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