Archives: Recordkeeping in Society

Citation

Ryan, D. (2006), "Archives: Recordkeeping in Society", Records Management Journal, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 67-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/09565690610654800

This new Australian book, dedicated to the memory of Robert Hartland, one of its contributing authors, aims to “provide a conceptual base for archival science” and its 328 pages tackle a variety of subjects with chapters ranging from “archival institutions” to “the records continuum”.

The editors' ambition is that the chapters can be read in any order and in that they succeed. Each of the 12 chapters is a self contained essay, some focusing on what “the archives” is for, and others exploring best practice in what archives do. The latter is especially true of chapters 4 and 5, which discuss the challenges of records (especially electronic records) as “contingent objects” at the start of the twenty‐first century.

The editors admit that there is inconsistency in the format of chapters and this makes the book more of a thought provoking work of ideas and case studies to be dipped into rather than a text to be read from cover to cover. Moreover, the English in the book is often quite dense and some of the concepts may well prove too challenging for the apprentice archivist. For example, in chapter 11, the description of a record as being “‘membranic’, the membrane allowing the infusing and exhaling of values which are embedded in each and every activation” touches on the pseudo‐philosophic.

The book's examples are drawn mainly from Antipodean and US sources, but the logic of the analysis is authoritative and of value to a UK audience. This is most evident in Chapter 6, where Hans Hofman uses the storyteller Elder in Aboriginal oral history as an analogy when discussing the “sanctity of tradition”, and he posits a searching question about the impact of the modern Western belief “of the dominance of the new and the future” on archival practice.

The final two chapters, “Recordkeeping and societal power” and “Archives and memory” are sobering in that they look at the political uses made of records, and detail the roles that Archives departments have played in supporting political processes and social engineering, both in fact and fiction, from the capture of the Bastille to the storming of the Stasi offices in Germany in the early 1990s.

This is a topic that archivists may not usually have time to consider fully, but which gives rise to a new role in today's ever‐changing society – as “active shapers or ‘co‐creators’ of collective and corporate memory” to mitigate a new risk, that of electronic amnesia. Yet even here, the authors guard against complacency in assuming that “we all know what memory and the archives‐memory formula actually mean, needing neither discussion nor definition.”

The sociological tone of these two chapters and, indeed, many of the contributions is intentional and the book can be seen as a mature attempt to widen the framework that archivists work within. As such, it may prove most useful to practicing archivists who wish to reflect on the nature of the job and the challenges of the future with leaders in the field as their guides.

A minor issue is with the images. Many chapters contain photographs, cartoons or diagrams or a combination of such, but these are of varying degrees of quality and resolution. The register at Figure 5.2 is illegible and in Figure 9.2 the triangle is so poorly drawn that two of the sides do not meet. It is surprising that the latter was not picked up during proofreading.