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Ten Challenges
for the Archival Profession
by
H. THOMAS HICKERSON, Cornell University
55th president of the
Society of American Archivists
This
address was delivered at the 64th annual meeting of the Society of American
Archivists in Denver, CO at the Adam's Mark Hotel.
Dedication
I am pleased
to dedicate my presidential address to Shonnie Finnegan. Shonnie was President
of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in 1985/1986. She had been elected
a Fellow of the Society in 1975, served on Council and its Executive Committee,
chaired the large and active Committee on College and University Archives, and
chaired the 1974 Program Committee. From 1980 to 1984, she represented the SAA
on the National Archives Advisory Council and served on the New York Historical
Records Advisory Board from 1976 to 1985. She is also a past member of the Council
and Executive Committee of the American Association of University Professors.
She recently retired after some thirty years as university archivist at the
State University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1979, she received the Chancellor's
Award for Excellence in Librarianship at the State University of New York.
Shonnie was
not exactly a mentor for me; she was more like an enthusiastic professional
big sister. She organized the first SAA program session in which I spoke. She
arranged my appointment to the College and University Archives Committee. She
created a sub-committee on Documenting the University Community and appointed
me chair. She later appointed me chair of the 1986 Program Committee, one of
the great jobs one can have in SAA. All of this certainly contributed to my
decision to dedicate today's remarks to Shonnie, who is not present but with
whom I exchanged e-mail last week, but the principal reason for my dedication
is because of the thoughtful support she provided to so many of my generation
of archivists, consistently exhibiting a generosity of spirit which I do not
believe is as common today in SAA, but which is very much needed.
In my address
last August as incoming president of SAA, I expressed my awareness of the daunting
challenges facing the archival profession at the beginning of the 21st
century. I concluded then that our knowledge and expertise are needed and appreciated
and that our prospects are good. I went on to assert that through our combined
interest in both confronting the challenges of contemporary information management
and in preserving the documentary heritage of the world's cultures, we are strategically
well positioned. This confluence of current needs and long-term societal interests
provides opportunities for strengthening the archival profession, but the complexities
that we face are considerable. I have selected and will describe ten challenges
that I feel are most pressing, both in the difficulties that they entail and
in the scope of their impact on our profession.
1. Managing
the identification, appraisal, retention, preservation, and provision of support
for the use of documents generated in electronic form.
Showing competency
in this area is critical for two different reasons. Most obviously, a significant
portion of present record production is in this form, and we must master the
ability to fulfill our professional mandate for these materials. Perhaps of
equal importance, we need to broadly convey evidence of our leadership in addressing
these issues. If we do not, a line will be drawn separating us from responsibility
for the records of today and tomorrow. Our value to our governments, institutions,
and corporations will steadily diminish, and available resources will be allocated
elsewhere as we become increasingly irrelevant and unsupported.
In many cases,
implementing solutions will require extensive cooperation with other information
management professionals. In our collaboration with others, we must be creative
in delineating new arrangements of responsibility and management with record
creators, records managers, technology staff, and those administering access.
While I agree with Linda Henry, when in her 1998 article, "Schellenberg in Cyberspace," she
insisted that archivists should continue to appraise records based on both
their informational and evidentiary value, I do not share her opinions regarding
the significance of physical custody. We must be flexible in our methods.
We
must focus on the goals of the archival mandate rather than on the specifics
of practice, and yes, on some days we may be like records managers in our
work
with records creators, and on other days, like librarians in administering
global access to electronic files. In some ways, I find the debates of the
past decade
to be about issues of the twentieth century, but not equally germane in the
21st. The paradigm may have already shifted.
That we have
not reached consensus on the ways to manage electronic records should not be
interpreted as alleviating the urgency of our responsibilities or our public
liabilities. If, however, we can demonstrate leadership in addressing these
issues, we will be recognized as a source of much-needed expertise and reliability
in an area of increasingly critical importance to the functioning of contemporary
society.
2. Devoting
greater resources to non-textual holdings.
In today's society,
where text is of decreasing centrality, we must be a more image- and sound-literate
profession. We have often acted as if we assumed that text-based communication
has always been the chief method of communication for all cultures, largely
ignoring the long oral tradition in all societies, and the importance of art,
architecture, music, ritual, dance, theater, and other non-textual and non-linear
means of expression and recording. We must balance our resources to address
these important segments of our collections, using these records more effectively
to engage the broad interests of our users.
Most of us are
aware of this need, but we are reluctant to embrace the necessary changes.
Similar issues apply in most areas of collecting. As James O'Toole urges
in his 1987
article, "Things of the Spirit: Documenting Religion in New England," archives
should employ as broad a definition as possible of what records are and of
what
events and phenomena are worth documenting. In additional to the importance
of still and motion-picture photography, he points to the importance of the
mass media in conveying evidence for the study of religion. O'Toole also addresses
the documentary value of religious art and decoration and of liturgical and
other religious music. He raises the question of whether the balance will someday
shift away from traditional manuscript sources. If we now add the wealth of
sources available via the Internet, integrating image, text, animation, motion,
and sound in a new document collage, isn't it reasonable for the majority of
repositories to devote at least half of their resources to non-textual materials?
3. Recognizing
that records are global.
We should not
envision geographic or territorial boundaries as excluding documentary materials
from our concern, and if appropriate, from our care. The archival mandate is
truly international. All records identified as having archival value should
matter to us. It is an underlying credo of the archival profession. How can
one value records in one location and not in another?
Knowledge of
the nature of records in relation to other cultures enriches our appreciation
of the relationship between records and our own culture. An understanding of
the complex nature of the relationship between archival records and the societies
and organizations that generate documents provides a useful antidote to the
potential for cultural and nationalistic bias.
Information management
is also global. Communication and computing standards are already international
in nature and application. There have been important institutional collaborations
in recent years. The networked environment fosters a cooperative approach and
significantly enhances the benefits of such projects. We should encourage the
International Council on Archives to develop a new vision that fosters the creation
of multi-national digital archives. Shared knowledge and collaboration will
strengthen our profession everywhere, and will also better prepare us in addressing
critical archival emergencies worldwide.
4. Devising
new methods for describing and providing user access to the ever-expanding volume
of contemporary records in all formats.
Archivists have
not been able to provide comprehensive intellectual control of and access to
their existing holdings through the use of the traditional description methods.
While Encoded Archival Description and developing means of networked searching
and display of finding aids will prove a valuable enhancement to our services
and offers improvement in existing practice, they do not sufficiently alter
the existing dynamic between collection growth and the human resources necessary
to produce finding aids and other traditional tools. We have been slowly, but
consistently, losing this battle; in the 21st century, without a
major shift in methodology, we will be overwhelmed. If however, we are willing
to adopt new strategies and methods, the same technologies that are generating
records at an ever-increasing pace can be employed to identify, analyze, and
preserve records, and to support and disseminate access to them.
Archivists have
traditionally described records after appraising and accessioning them, by
examining their content and structure. In the electronic environment, post-accessioning
description may prove difficult, but description could become a basic element
in records creation. As David Bearman and Margaret Hedstrom describe in their
1993 article, "Reinventing Archives for Electronic Records: Alternative Service
Delivery Options," "...metadata about the records and the configuration of permissions,
views, and functions is created and controlled in the active data environment.
In principle, this metadata if correctly specified could fully describe and
document the records without post-hoc activity by archivists. Archivists will
need to specify what metadata must be kept and how it should be linked to records
over time." Because record creators and archivists have a similar stake in
the same privacy, security, management, and use characteristics of records,
it is
in their mutual interest to jointly contribute to the associated costs of this
process.
Bearman and Hedstrom
also discuss ways in which this same model affects access and use. The unique
nature of many paper records has significantly limited their availability, but
in the case of electronic records, access can be distributed broadly, significantly
expanding the ability of individuals to get information from archives. Perhaps
of equal significance, metadata generated at the point of record creation may
support item-level description without archivists having to engage in item-level
description.
Technologically,
such changes are beginning to evolve, but it will require new professional roles
and new institutional relationships and commitments. We have not yet fully tested
and implemented the necessary new models for establishing this integrated continuum
of creation, management, use, and preservation of records, and research and
development is urgently needed. Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic, and
I am hopeful that new methodologies developed for an electronic information
environment will also supply us with new approaches to the description of existing
paper holdings.
5. Making
our holdings more accessible and useable by our core constituencies and to broaden
use by expanded audiences.
While enhancing
our service to our core constituencies, we must develop new, secondary audiences.
As Elsie Freeman Finch emphasizes in her introduction to Advocating Archives, "Use is our reason for being." All
activities that encourage use comprise a core function that permeates everything
we do. Traditional hands-on use will
remain essential and vital to our mission, but networked use will steadily
expand. Users, wherever they are located, will expect to have access to both
information
and to associated services, whether they are the staff of multi-national corporations
or governmental diplomatic missions or interested researchers worldwide. In
developing digital resources, we initially focused on content, but we are now
beginning to turn our attention to designing and implementing the services
necessary
to support effective collection use in a networked environment. The use of
focus groups and the analysis of data recording patterns of online navigation
and
use will help us develop useful and efficient means to meet the service needs
of our various clienteles.
Focusing on our
users implies that we acknowledge the primacy of their needs and respond by
utilizing methods that address those needs. Illustrative of these issues
is
Karen Collins' 1997 Pease Award-winning article, "Providing Subject Access to
Images: A Study of User Queries." This study analyzed user requests for still
photographs from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and from the
North Carolina State Archives. Principal findings included: (1) the overwhelming
majority of requests were for images to be used for publication or exhibition,
as opposed to historical research; (2) 86% of queries included subject terms;
(3) only 4% of all queries from either institution specified the creator of
the image; and (4) not a single user requested to see an image in the context
of an existing collection. I do not need to comment on the meaning of these
findings regarding the adequacy of access approaches that are largely provenance-based.
Karen Collins
agrees with Sara Shatford Layne's conclusion, in the Journal of the American
Society for Information Science, that beyond subject categories, users'
principal need is to be able to make visual distinctions between similar images
by viewing them. "Digital image databases that combine the thumbnail presentation
of images with verbal indexing schemes provide the possibility of such access." To
really be user-centered in our activities, we have to be willing to embrace
such findings and make tough strategic decisions about methods and resource
allocation.
We should provide
networked reference service and online advertisement of our holdings. We should
also explore the development of multi-institutional portals aggregating access
to related materials. Retrospectively converting more materials to digital form
gives us the capacity to better serve existing audiences and to reach new audiences.
Additionally, it enables more flexible and creative use of our holdings. And
while I believe that we should avoid offering commercial vendors exclusivity,
we should be open to the potential of for-profit entities to provide effective
access for certain segments of the user market.
Innovative approaches
in supporting use will often prove essential with information generated in electronic
form, since users will often want to use them in the form in which they were
created. Through systematic employment of digital technologies, we can establish
a continuum of access to earlier records and to tomorrow's records, enhancing
recognition of the value of both. We can keep yesterday's records relevant to
future generations that will have been raised in a time when only images and
information distributed digitally seem useable.
6. Expanding
the scope of our collection development priorities.
We should always
be striving to document the under-documented. The spectrum of human experience
and human interest is always expanding, and we have a responsibility to be
inclusive
within the range of our institutional mandates. When I entered the profession
some 30 years ago, the "new social history" was just beginning to evolve,
and we were challenged to pursue records of women and minorities, who had
been previously
ignored. We were also asked to document aspects of human existence that had
fallen outside the normal range of inclusion, documenting social and organizational
relationships. Our acquiring of new documents must be based on both the recognition
of existing gaps and the identification of new areas. During the past 15
years,
our increasing attention to sexuality and sexual politics in society is a good
example. New areas of collecting may also require new kinds of records. Population
and environmental studies, for example, will use newly generated geo-spatial
data, along with more traditional records.
As our population
becomes more ethnically diverse, our existing inadequacies in documenting minority
communities become even more serious. In many cases, the best strategy is to
support the growth of community-based archival programs, but in other cases,
university, federal, and state initiatives are needed. An outstanding example
of the exercise of a state archival mandate through creative efforts to broaden
documentation for overlooked aspects of a state's programs, organizations, and
people is the joint effort of the New York State Historical Records Advisory
Board and the State Archives and Records Administration to address new documentary
priorities. Their three principal priorities are issues and experiences in the
areas of (1) mental health, (2) environmental affairs, and (3) Latino communities.
This initiative is designed to generate partnerships across a broad range of
archives, academic programs and community agencies.
7. Generating
more basic and applied research on archival aspects of information management.
Research must
be an integral component of the archival enterprise. Archivists have frequently
expressed their concern for the lack of substantive research in many areas of
archival work. Edie Hedlin focused her presidential address in 1994 on the need
to develop a greater infrastructure to support research, and in the past dozen
years, significant progress has been made. Faculty and graduate students at
academic programs focusing on archival studies have made substantive contributions.
Yet, the number of full-time faculty and doctoral students is still relatively
few. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has offered
greater support for electronic records research, and through SAA's representative
on the Commission, we have encouraged the NHPRC to provide graduate research
grants and to support research conducted within archival institutions. Conducting
effective research is in large part dependent on the adequacy of financial support,
and archival research needs a significant infusion of additional funding. The
National Science Foundation, other government agencies, large foundations, and
corporate interests should all be contributing.
Our issues are
broadly compelling, but we have not conceptualized and presented them in a way
that their centrality is easily understood. We should work to better associate
archival priorities with national issues presently drawing significant attention,
such as security, privacy, authentication, authenticity, distributed networks,
the life-cycle of information, digital library development, citizen access to
information, networked user services, digital archiving, commercial use of information,
copyright and information property rights management, and the relationship between
records, information, and knowledge. We need to convince influential decision-makers
of both the importance of our questions and of our ability to address them,
but we must also be willing to accept that much of the research vital to our
interests will be conducted outside of the archival aegis. We need many others
to care about and contribute to solving archival problems. Ideally, we should
offer guidance to these inquiries, and most importantly, we should take advantage
of the results to better address our basic goals.
8. Strengthening
our national archival organization.
During this past
year, I have consistently sought to highlight this issue because I think that
a strong Society of American Archivists is central to our profession's capacity
to address many of the other challenges I have enumerated. As Nicholas Burckel
described in his 1997 Presidential Address, since SAA's founding in 1936, it
has grown substantially, from 250 members in 1940 to 850 in 1965, to more than
3,000 today, a twelve-fold increase. It has become more democratic, more diverse,
more complex, more productive, and a more influential organization. But as he
points out, while SAA does many of the things that some larger allied organizations
do -- hold annual meetings, publish a journal and a newsletter, develop professional
standards, offer educational programs, monitor and influence legislation, and
educate the public regarding our principal issues -- yet, the American Library
Association is more than ten times our size, the American Historical Association
is nearly four times as large and the Organization of American historians is
nearly three times as large.
A growing, dynamic,
diverse, and dedicated membership is fundamental to SAA's strength. We need
more members. While individual membership has been stable in 2000, and institutional
membership has grown, this follows a period of moderate membership decline.
While the extent of our mandate demands a larger membership, the resulting infusion
of new ideas and talents is also essential in maintaining a dynamic organization.
The growth of student chapters is an exciting new development with excellent
promise for bringing some of the best and brightest into SAA. We also have to
recruit young archivists already in the work force. In doing so, SAA must have
an identifiable profile that generates interest. Involvement by new or potential
members must be rewarding, stimulating, and enjoyable. The existing membership
must be willing to devote resources, both personal and organizational, to welcoming
and involving new archivists. We have to be willing to acknowledge that these
individuals bring knowledge and perspective that can be as valuable to SAA and
the profession as the experience of more senior members. It is not just about
mentoring; the learning process should go both ways. SAA also must be a diverse
organization in which members of minorities are actively recruited, and in which
differing perspectives are valued. Archives are multicultural by their very
nature; SAA must be also.
In addition to
recruiting new members, we must retain the involvement and support of long-time
members. Senior archivists offer leadership, professional accomplishment, dedication,
and understanding. Many have advanced to positions of significant influence
in their organizations. While some may no longer be identified as practicing
archivists, their involvement may now be even more valuable. Maintaining an
effective balance that encourages active involvement by new archivists while
retaining the participation and commitment of more senior professionals is absolutely
essential to the health and strength of this organization, and a strong national
organization is essential to the success of the archival enterprise.
9. Augmenting
the range of skills, knowledge, and resources engaged in the archival enterprise.
We should envision
the archival endeavor as an industry, as well as a profession. We need more
archivists, and soon, but not everyone contributing needs to be an archivist.
Archival programs need technologists, Web designers, human factors experts,
publicists, fundraisers, managers, lawyers, and administrators, as well as librarians,
museum curators, records managers, exhibition designers, and preservation specialists.
We need an organizational model that accommodates the diverse range of necessary
skills. Within this model, archivists should take the lead in defining goals
and objectives, devising appropriate methods, and ensuring the fulfillment of
the archival mission, but we must depend on a far more expansive range of abilities
and expertise.
This vision of
our enterprise must influence our policies and practices at all levels. We must
work to establish broad public appreciation of our concerns. We must support
the creation and adoption of laws that facilitate the fulfillment of archival
responsibilities. Long-term institutional and governmental commitments to preservation
of and access to records over time are essential. It is vital to create and
maintain alliances with kindred cultural and information management organizations.
The development of technological infrastructure should incorporate features
enhancing our ability to manage recorded information effectively, and individual
repositories must be adequately equipped to address the needs of today's and
tomorrow's information environment. Our approach to education and the necessary
criteria for archival employment should be broadly conceived. It is no longer
sufficient to focus only on archival principles and expertise. Everyone must
have an underlying understanding of information technology and a flexible approach
to learning new skills and devising new methods. Career-long continuing education
is required, and we should assume constant change in both our organizations
and our practices. We must be able to envision many professions playing coordinated
roles in realizing the archival mandate.
10. Maintaining
the credibility of our role as respected evidentiary authorities and as trusted
guarantors of society's interests, today and in the future.
Archivists are
seen as trusted agents of society, acting on everyone's behalf in insuring the
preservation of those records necessary in protecting the legal rights of each
citizen and in preserving the historical record of human achievement, of cultural
evolution, and of everyday life. We have a special role in society, and we are
respected as ombudsmen acting in the public interest and in each person's interest.
Sometimes we are insufficiently conscious of the special respect extended to
our role, but it is one of the most important elements underlying our value
and importance to society. We need to take the necessary steps to sustain our
credibility by maintaining a high level of professionalism, by fulfilling our
commitments, and by honoring our profession.
The dramatic
nature of our role is forcefully conveyed in the words of H. L. White in his
foreword to T. R. Schellenberg's Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques,
published in 1956. After describing the establishment of an Australian
national archival program during the height of World War II, White, then Australia's
Commonwealth Librarian and Archival Authority, writes, "We should expect that
the continuing crisis provided by the discovery of atomic power to have a like
effect on the preservation of archives in the future, unless we entirely abandon
hope for our civilization. Indeed, one of the special problems facing archivists
in their administrative relationships and in their public relations generally
is just this uncertainty. In a very real sense the governmental and public attitude
towards the preservation of archives is a measure of our faith in the future." Now,
nearly fifty years later, this belief in the value of the archival mission
still conveys a measure of the public's faith in the future.
The American
Archivist 49 (Winter 1986): 4. H.
Thomas Hickerson, "The Archival Enterprise on Entering the Year 2000," Archival
Outlook, November/December 1999, 14-16.
Linda J. Henry,
Schellenberg in Cyberspace," The American Archivist 61 (Fall 1998): 314-327.
James M. O'Toole, "Things of the Spirit: Documenting
Religion in New England," The American
Archivist 50 (Fall 1987): 513-515.
H. Thomas Hickerson, "SAA and the Archival Community Worldwide," Archival Outlook, January/February
2000, 3 & 29.
David Bearman
and Margaret Hedstrom, "Reinventing Archives for Electronic Records: Alternative
Service Delivery Options," in Electronic Records Management Program Strategies, Archives
and Museum Informatics Technical Report No. 18, edited by Margaret Hedstrom
(Pittsburgh: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1993), 87.
Bearman and
Hedstrom, "Reinventing Archives for Electronic Records," 88.
Elsie Freeman
Finch, Editor, Advocating Archives: An Introduction to Public Relations for
Archivists (Metuchen, New Jersey, and London: The Society of American Archivists
and The Scarecrow Press, Inc.) 1.
Karen Collins, "Providing Subject Access to Images: A Study
of User Queries," The American
Archivist 61 (Spring 1998): 45-52.
Sara Shatford
Layne, "Some Issues in the Indexing of Images," Journal of the American Society
for Information Science 45 (Sept. 1994): 586.
Karen Collins, "Providing Subject Access to Images," 53.
New York State
Historical Records Advisory Board, "NY Heritage Documentation Project," http://www.nyshrab.org/nyheritagedoc.htm.
Edie Hedlin, "Expanding the Foundation," The American Archivist 58 (Winter 1995):
10-15.
Nicholas C.
Burckel, "The Society: From Birth to Maturity," The American Archivist 61
(Spring 1998): 32-34.
H. L. White,
Foreword in Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques by T. R. Schellenberg
(Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1956), vii-viii.
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