Jenny Bunn: I think we need really is for you to tell me what you're doing and what you want, to have me to do, so to speak
Stef Bailey: We are doing MA in Goldsmith's in Contemporary Art Theory and this course is called MA LAB transforming critical practises which has been.. basically we have been invited to do group projects which I guess we had sort of to define on our own, and we got into the notion of archive and documentation. I think this really came out of this, sort of, the formation of the groups. We started of as a large group and I think we became aware of documenting meetings and things that we said, and trying to find ways to sort of facilitate a platform in which everyone would have a voice, which was quite difficult and then we sort of started to get into institution itself and archives. We started to.. we decided to visit the archives of the White Cube, the Tate, the British Museum, and the John Latham archive
Kiki Claxton: We are very much interested in what the archive is? How can it be performed? And also kind of the subject within the archive as well. So it is kind of just doing a kind of research into all those different aspects and areas
S.B.: So this sort of idea of containing the information, actually, and we are quite interested in the space itself
K.C.: and how it can be presented?
Lisa Mazza: And one thing that we had up front was all this legal implications that are related to archives, I mean this tension between the freedom of information and the data protection. How this plays out against each other?
J.B.: And what is the outcome of your project supposed to be? Are you supposed to produce of anything?
S.B.: Well, at the moment we have a website and we have just been documenting all of the visits that we have had, because we have had different experience in each space, I think. The first one was the White Cube and it was really the notion of this kind of.. we were actually reading the SCAM , their definition of what an archive was?! and actually the White Cube is an artificial archive, because they actually actively collect information related to their artists that are from outside of the gallery, so they collect both from within the gallery and outside. And also it was interesting cause it was a private space, but was operating very publicly, or you know, on the surface publicly. And then, after that we went to the British Museum which was this very historical administrative archive, so in a sense it was closed within its time frame, but was still open in a sense, there were still entries coming in. And then from the Tate we got introduced to the three sort of stagings of the archival material, so it was the current, the semi-current and historic, and I think it was really at the Tate that this dialectic between the data protection act and the freedom of information act really came into play, because you had this kind of staging of timeframes which sort of allowed, determined how much you were allowed to make public.
K.C.: And then we went to King's, yesterday? Two days ago? Just looking at, kind of, their law archive and that's kind of where we started to go more into the limitation around that
S.B.: And the John Latham archive, thinking about the digitalisation of archiving which in the public institutions is quite new, it is not anything that has really been explored, which makes this very interesting, actually
J.B.: yes, the John Latham archive is very interesting, because it certainly pushes the boundaries of what traditional archivist would think of as cataloging, for which reason it is quite interesting. I'm trying to pick what you have just said, there is a lot in there and I am not quite sure which sort of tension, or which difference it is that you are interested in. Is it the closed/ opened difference or ..?
S.B. Yea, now that we have gone into it more, I think, we have become really interested in the law between the data protection and the freedom of information, and also moving into digital privacy, as well. We have actually started to actively going into the privacy policies of a lot of online platforms
K.C.: And social sites and thing like that, which they in themselves are an archive of the individual, which is dispersed over the thousands, millions, so we have been just kind of getting more and more interest into that, and looking into specifically: Google, Facebook, Twitter
S.B.: It's really sort of like the notion of the internet as an archive, but it's also the idea of the institutionalisation of the archive as well, which we experienced in the public institutions, and it became its very interesting kind of the public institution, its archive, it's sort of tittering between public and private, the whole time, it is always mediating this flow of information as such
K.C.: And where we stand within that ourselves, because all of the information that we are holding, and that we are digesting or collecting, is of course, being an online resource with our own blog or website
J.B.: Ok, this is yet again, a lot in there, public and private we've move on to and also the wider information. I think maybe what I need to do is, I need to start from the beginning, maybe, is there a beginning?! Start from the beginning in terms of give you some background in to way archives have sort of developed, I think, an archival theory. And obviously stop me, cause I can go on forever about this, so stop me if anything occurs to you that fits or resinates with anything that you are doing. Because I think you have been introduced to the live cycle model, by the sound of it, but you might not necessarily be as aware of things like continuum model, don't know if you have heard of the records: continuum. And that may be a theoretical model that will help with your thinking. I guess we go back to about 1898, when a manual was published in Holland, called the Manual for the Arrangement of and Description of Archives, we just call it the Dutch manual now. It was published and it was written by three individuals Muller, Feith and Fruin, under the Dutch Professional Association for Archivists, and it is seen in some ways as a sort of beginning as it explicates, expresses what we hold most dear , which are these two principles: called the principle of provenance and the principle of the original order. These principles had seen as sort of guiding theories, guiding concepts for the archival profession ever since. Provenance is a concern with the creator, the origination of the material , so you have to keep all your archives produced by the same creator , sort of, together and separate, so you are not allowed to split them up, and equally original order is very similar and as much as it is about respecting the order that they were used in and the order that they were created in, the idea being that it is that order that will actually give you some clues as to, sort of, it will give you more information about the material, because all of these archives relate to each other and so, if you have this sense of how they connect and you are gonna get more out of it, and building on all of that there is this sense of an archive as something called an organic whole. So this idea, which I think is picked up on, cause you were talking about collections being slightly different or artificial archive. This idea of organic archive is something that sort of grows, develops, it's about the organisation, it's sort of like innocent byproduct of that organisations activity, it reflects that organisation activity and it forms an organic whole and, obviously, the idea of organic whole gives an idea of boundaries there. So there is this sort of boundary around this organic whole. In archives we have this another concept called the fonds. Fonds is kind of a way of expressing this idea of an organic whole, so quite a lot of archival theory over the years is been about: how to recognise this boundary around the fonds, how to recognise this boundary around the organic whole? Because archivists, sort of, see themselves as not necessarily drawing this boundary, but sort of recognising this boundary, so in some ways this boundary already exists and we have to try trace it out somehow, without sort of becoming implicated in the drawing of that boundary around that organic whole, so that's something to put to one side, but that's kind of very important, because that kind of defines how archives work and how archivists think.
S.B.: That sort of relates to the John Latham archive and that he sort of, I don't know if he spoke to ... about this, that Latham believed that the structures were already there, they just had to be made visible, that was a lot what his work was about
J.B.: And the thing with Latham is that that idea of the organic whole, quite a lot of archival theory I guess developed very much from a sort of administrative organisational aspect and there have always been questions, well, not always, but there have long been questions about how much that sort of idea of the principle of provenance and the principle of original order can be implemented with regard to personal archives, because original order for an organisational archive has relatively easier to implement, so for example, we would say this is the archives of this business, that's the fonds, then we've got the records of this department, that's their sub-fonds, we've got records of this department, that's their sub-fonds, then within those different departments we've got, what we call, the series, which is sort of like sequences. Material produced by the same activity or filing instance, and all sort of breaks down quite nicely, because organisations naturally tend to sort of or have in the past tended to sort of break themselves down to that sort of hierarchical way of thinking, but that 's not true on personal papers and so what you could argue with Latham is that that is a true representation of the original order and for example breaking it all down and having a class of correspondence , a class of notebooks, a class of whatever, which is something that a traditional archivist might have done. But with the Latham, the original order is possibly the origin is within Latham's thought and it sort of, the originating movement, the originating power of Latham 's archive is, it's reflecting in that, his way of thought. So it does tell you more about Latham, because it reflects his way of thinking and the way of viewing the world. Again, I am not sure how many of my fellow archivists would agree with that, but it is an alternative way of thinking about the original order. And original order is difficult to implement with personal papers, it has long been recognised, if you want to work more on that there is a lot on the arrangement of personal papers that's been written, people like Jennifer Douglas and Heather MacNeil. It is about this idea of, what does it mean to arrange personal papers and all of this is, I think, building up to this idea that the archivist is more implicated than they think or , maybe, that they necessarily always admitted to. Hilary Jenkinson, who is another , sort of, seminal thinker, I don't even know if he was a thinker, but he was a seminal practitioner and he wrote something called the Manual for the Administration of the Archives , which was first published in 1922, and his manual, in his philosophy, the archivist was sort of a passive custodian of truth, with a capital T. You know, very objective, they sort of stood outside it all and they were sort of custodian and so this is very sort of strong theme of objectivity in there, which archivists, which, sort of, again goes with this idea of organic whole and that we are not drawing the boundary, we are just recognising the boundary, we are sort of, if you like, policing the boundary that is important in some ways, so there is that very strong. And recent years, that has been completely overturned and you can called it what you like, postmodernism, you can call it new paradime, you can call it whatever you like, sometimes we talk in terms of custodialism and post-custodialism, but whatever happens there has been that change and archivists are increasingly recognising that they are not outside, that they are implicated and that everything they do impacts on how their archive is seen.
S.B.: That's something that came up in every visit that we had, was the subjectivity of the archivist. That everyone made the note that an archive would change according to the archivist who is in charge of it
K.C.: and the characteristics
J.B.: and that recognition is fairly recent
L.M.: Cause I think our expectations was also to encounter this more in a private archive then in the public archive. The public archive would be much more reglamented in a way that this subjective position would kind of feid or like would not be the present
S.B.: But become more institutionalised
L.M. : Yes
S.B.: But then this was interesting, because in the British Museum, the lady, who is in charge of the administrative archive, was talking about how in the 70s archiving practises changed to become more about access, to become more open
J.B.: yes
S.B.: And then she said that it was a little bit more disorganised and one of her predecessors had thrown out a box with records without asking. And then, actually, after our visit to the Tate there was this article in the Guardian, that basically said that a photographic archive from the Tate had just been thrown out in the skip and it was taken out by someone else who had been given an anonymous call to pick it up. And they mentioned that the same thing had happened in the V&A, and we found this interesting in the sense of the subjective archivist in taking/ making these kind of executive decisions with information and records that are essentially public
J.B.: but then it's down to responsibility, whose responsibility is it..
S.B. : Right..
J.B.: The archivist takes on their a responsibility and maybe the archivist feels that they are allowed to have that responsibility, because they have been trained, or they are nominally an expert in this field, but you know, all people are human, and mistakes are made. I am not going to say that mistakes haven't been made and mistakes will be made. But again, now you are moving in this sort of ideas of authority and trust, which is another big area, where archivists are looking at the moment, this idea of, you know, this part and parts of this idea of subjectivity of the archivist. The power of the archivist is the idea that they are regarded in some ways as an authority, so for example, there have been cases in the past where, I think it was at the Tate, I can't remember, but an artist who was also a forger was inserting material providing evidence that his paintings were sort of not forgeries, into archive material. Because the fact that it was within this archive, gave it authority. So, there is this idea that by the very nature of being within an archive gives it some kind of guarantee of authenticity. And authenticity is another concept that archivist are very interested in. We see it as our role to sort of, still, to guard the authenticity of the material. To ensure that their authenticity cannot be questioned in a way. So, it is all very mixed up
S.B.: It is pretty heavy, cause I mean it is a lot of responsibility, if you think. When you talk about the idea of provenance and original order, this notion that the archive reflects the structures and hierarchies at play, like, I mean, that's quite loaded, isn't it?
J.B.: Yea. Power is in there all the time and we do recognise that now. So, I don't know, it is very difficult .
J.B.: I was going to tell you about the continuum model. So you know about the live cycle model. LIve cycle model has probably been fairly prevalent in about the 50s. I think, I probably have to tell you a bit about the appraisal as well, to make any sense. So talking about Jenkinson. Jenkinson first published his manual in 1922, but he was working through to the 30s and 40s. He worked in the National Archives or the Public Record offices it was then for a while, so he was a practising archivist. He was also instrumental in founding the course here, so professional education for archivists at university level started sort of post-second world war and Jenkinson was instrumental first starting the course here, but there were courses at Liverpool at sort of very similar time 1947, something like that. Anyway, Jenkinson, is a very important figure and as I said, he was very keen on this idea of objectivity, this idea of passive guardian of the truth. And one way in which he sort of followed through on that, was that he did not see or he tried to minimise as much as possible the role of the archivist in selecting which records came to the archive.
This idea of organic whole again. If this organic whole comes to you as an archivist, you should respect it, you should recognise it as such, and it is not for you to start, you know, chopping bits of it, so to speak. It's cause that would then damage this idea of its organic nature, as an organic entity. His feeling was that it is the sort of administrators of the record, again, we are very much in a governmental, kind or, organisational aspect, thats were Jenkinson was. They can read it, because they are doing in a sort of natural way, but the archivist should not be involved in the appraisal and they should not be involved in making decision about what to keep and about what not to keep, they just deal with what they get. So that was kind of, you know, logical in a way, because it does fit in with his idea that we are sort of this objective, neutral outsider , we know the third party, we are not involved in that sort of thing. So it kind of work, but of course that was completely unsustainable and it probably never happened even at the time and so by the 1950s in America this time, so we have moved to America. A man called Schellenberg, who is another seminal figure in the history of archival theory, he is sort of seen as the father of selection and also the father of records management, because he did see a role in this idea, he saw that a decision had to be made about what to keep and what not to keep. You know, volumes of records were increasing, there were so much backlog, there were huge piles of records, so you sort of had to make a decision, you had to decide what to keep and what not to keep. And he does, sort of, talk about appraisal and this idea of selection and he comes up with the taxonomy of values to help him make this decision. But of course, the other thing that happens once you sort of make this split, is you start to get things on either side of the split. So if you have made this decision what to keep in an archive and what not to keep in an archive, that indicates that there is an archive on this side and also something else on this side. You sort of get this idea of records management coming in, at this time as well. So, your records manager operates within the organisation. Your records manager manages the records for the use of the business. At some point a decision is made when this material is no longer of use to the business: do we need to keep it or do we not? And if we need to keep it, it goes into the archive and if we don't keep it, we just throw it away. So this is sort of evolution here, this is why we now talk about archives and records management. This is where the life cycle comes from, so you have current records, probably under the … records manager , semi-current records, … records manager, non-current records, that's when the decision is made and at that point they are either consigned to it and he just used these terms, and they are either consigned to heaven, archival heaven or sort of, the bin, the hell. That's where the life cycle comes in. It comes in the 50s and it comes with this idea of appraisal and selection. The taxonomy of values ..
You have primary value, which is value to the organisation … purposes, secondary value, which is value to other people apart from the creators so to speak , then you have that divided into evidential value and informational value and that's his taxonomy of values, and that's were archives where for a very long time, until about, I don't know, 90s, maybe. And in the 1990s the life cycle was sort of challenged in a way as a model by what is known as a continuum model. Which is developed this time in Australia. So we are going around the globe and the interesting thing is that Schellenberg actually went on a lecture tour of Australia. So there is that sort of an interconnection. but again Australians found themselves in a different context , you know, they were relatively young country and so they were in a slightly different context.
To be continued...
Stef Bailey: We are doing MA in Goldsmith's in Contemporary Art Theory and this course is called MA LAB transforming critical practises which has been.. basically we have been invited to do group projects which I guess we had sort of to define on our own, and we got into the notion of archive and documentation. I think this really came out of this, sort of, the formation of the groups. We started of as a large group and I think we became aware of documenting meetings and things that we said, and trying to find ways to sort of facilitate a platform in which everyone would have a voice, which was quite difficult and then we sort of started to get into institution itself and archives. We started to.. we decided to visit the archives of the White Cube, the Tate, the British Museum, and the John Latham archive
Kiki Claxton: We are very much interested in what the archive is? How can it be performed? And also kind of the subject within the archive as well. So it is kind of just doing a kind of research into all those different aspects and areas
S.B.: So this sort of idea of containing the information, actually, and we are quite interested in the space itself
K.C.: and how it can be presented?
Lisa Mazza: And one thing that we had up front was all this legal implications that are related to archives, I mean this tension between the freedom of information and the data protection. How this plays out against each other?
J.B.: And what is the outcome of your project supposed to be? Are you supposed to produce of anything?
S.B.: Well, at the moment we have a website and we have just been documenting all of the visits that we have had, because we have had different experience in each space, I think. The first one was the White Cube and it was really the notion of this kind of.. we were actually reading the SCAM , their definition of what an archive was?! and actually the White Cube is an artificial archive, because they actually actively collect information related to their artists that are from outside of the gallery, so they collect both from within the gallery and outside. And also it was interesting cause it was a private space, but was operating very publicly, or you know, on the surface publicly. And then, after that we went to the British Museum which was this very historical administrative archive, so in a sense it was closed within its time frame, but was still open in a sense, there were still entries coming in. And then from the Tate we got introduced to the three sort of stagings of the archival material, so it was the current, the semi-current and historic, and I think it was really at the Tate that this dialectic between the data protection act and the freedom of information act really came into play, because you had this kind of staging of timeframes which sort of allowed, determined how much you were allowed to make public.
K.C.: And then we went to King's, yesterday? Two days ago? Just looking at, kind of, their law archive and that's kind of where we started to go more into the limitation around that
S.B.: And the John Latham archive, thinking about the digitalisation of archiving which in the public institutions is quite new, it is not anything that has really been explored, which makes this very interesting, actually
J.B.: yes, the John Latham archive is very interesting, because it certainly pushes the boundaries of what traditional archivist would think of as cataloging, for which reason it is quite interesting. I'm trying to pick what you have just said, there is a lot in there and I am not quite sure which sort of tension, or which difference it is that you are interested in. Is it the closed/ opened difference or ..?
S.B. Yea, now that we have gone into it more, I think, we have become really interested in the law between the data protection and the freedom of information, and also moving into digital privacy, as well. We have actually started to actively going into the privacy policies of a lot of online platforms
K.C.: And social sites and thing like that, which they in themselves are an archive of the individual, which is dispersed over the thousands, millions, so we have been just kind of getting more and more interest into that, and looking into specifically: Google, Facebook, Twitter
S.B.: It's really sort of like the notion of the internet as an archive, but it's also the idea of the institutionalisation of the archive as well, which we experienced in the public institutions, and it became its very interesting kind of the public institution, its archive, it's sort of tittering between public and private, the whole time, it is always mediating this flow of information as such
K.C.: And where we stand within that ourselves, because all of the information that we are holding, and that we are digesting or collecting, is of course, being an online resource with our own blog or website
J.B.: Ok, this is yet again, a lot in there, public and private we've move on to and also the wider information. I think maybe what I need to do is, I need to start from the beginning, maybe, is there a beginning?! Start from the beginning in terms of give you some background in to way archives have sort of developed, I think, an archival theory. And obviously stop me, cause I can go on forever about this, so stop me if anything occurs to you that fits or resinates with anything that you are doing. Because I think you have been introduced to the live cycle model, by the sound of it, but you might not necessarily be as aware of things like continuum model, don't know if you have heard of the records: continuum. And that may be a theoretical model that will help with your thinking. I guess we go back to about 1898, when a manual was published in Holland, called the Manual for the Arrangement of and Description of Archives, we just call it the Dutch manual now. It was published and it was written by three individuals Muller, Feith and Fruin, under the Dutch Professional Association for Archivists, and it is seen in some ways as a sort of beginning as it explicates, expresses what we hold most dear , which are these two principles: called the principle of provenance and the principle of the original order. These principles had seen as sort of guiding theories, guiding concepts for the archival profession ever since. Provenance is a concern with the creator, the origination of the material , so you have to keep all your archives produced by the same creator , sort of, together and separate, so you are not allowed to split them up, and equally original order is very similar and as much as it is about respecting the order that they were used in and the order that they were created in, the idea being that it is that order that will actually give you some clues as to, sort of, it will give you more information about the material, because all of these archives relate to each other and so, if you have this sense of how they connect and you are gonna get more out of it, and building on all of that there is this sense of an archive as something called an organic whole. So this idea, which I think is picked up on, cause you were talking about collections being slightly different or artificial archive. This idea of organic archive is something that sort of grows, develops, it's about the organisation, it's sort of like innocent byproduct of that organisations activity, it reflects that organisation activity and it forms an organic whole and, obviously, the idea of organic whole gives an idea of boundaries there. So there is this sort of boundary around this organic whole. In archives we have this another concept called the fonds. Fonds is kind of a way of expressing this idea of an organic whole, so quite a lot of archival theory over the years is been about: how to recognise this boundary around the fonds, how to recognise this boundary around the organic whole? Because archivists, sort of, see themselves as not necessarily drawing this boundary, but sort of recognising this boundary, so in some ways this boundary already exists and we have to try trace it out somehow, without sort of becoming implicated in the drawing of that boundary around that organic whole, so that's something to put to one side, but that's kind of very important, because that kind of defines how archives work and how archivists think.
S.B.: That sort of relates to the John Latham archive and that he sort of, I don't know if he spoke to ... about this, that Latham believed that the structures were already there, they just had to be made visible, that was a lot what his work was about
J.B.: And the thing with Latham is that that idea of the organic whole, quite a lot of archival theory I guess developed very much from a sort of administrative organisational aspect and there have always been questions, well, not always, but there have long been questions about how much that sort of idea of the principle of provenance and the principle of original order can be implemented with regard to personal archives, because original order for an organisational archive has relatively easier to implement, so for example, we would say this is the archives of this business, that's the fonds, then we've got the records of this department, that's their sub-fonds, we've got records of this department, that's their sub-fonds, then within those different departments we've got, what we call, the series, which is sort of like sequences. Material produced by the same activity or filing instance, and all sort of breaks down quite nicely, because organisations naturally tend to sort of or have in the past tended to sort of break themselves down to that sort of hierarchical way of thinking, but that 's not true on personal papers and so what you could argue with Latham is that that is a true representation of the original order and for example breaking it all down and having a class of correspondence , a class of notebooks, a class of whatever, which is something that a traditional archivist might have done. But with the Latham, the original order is possibly the origin is within Latham's thought and it sort of, the originating movement, the originating power of Latham 's archive is, it's reflecting in that, his way of thought. So it does tell you more about Latham, because it reflects his way of thinking and the way of viewing the world. Again, I am not sure how many of my fellow archivists would agree with that, but it is an alternative way of thinking about the original order. And original order is difficult to implement with personal papers, it has long been recognised, if you want to work more on that there is a lot on the arrangement of personal papers that's been written, people like Jennifer Douglas and Heather MacNeil. It is about this idea of, what does it mean to arrange personal papers and all of this is, I think, building up to this idea that the archivist is more implicated than they think or , maybe, that they necessarily always admitted to. Hilary Jenkinson, who is another , sort of, seminal thinker, I don't even know if he was a thinker, but he was a seminal practitioner and he wrote something called the Manual for the Administration of the Archives , which was first published in 1922, and his manual, in his philosophy, the archivist was sort of a passive custodian of truth, with a capital T. You know, very objective, they sort of stood outside it all and they were sort of custodian and so this is very sort of strong theme of objectivity in there, which archivists, which, sort of, again goes with this idea of organic whole and that we are not drawing the boundary, we are just recognising the boundary, we are sort of, if you like, policing the boundary that is important in some ways, so there is that very strong. And recent years, that has been completely overturned and you can called it what you like, postmodernism, you can call it new paradime, you can call it whatever you like, sometimes we talk in terms of custodialism and post-custodialism, but whatever happens there has been that change and archivists are increasingly recognising that they are not outside, that they are implicated and that everything they do impacts on how their archive is seen.
S.B.: That's something that came up in every visit that we had, was the subjectivity of the archivist. That everyone made the note that an archive would change according to the archivist who is in charge of it
K.C.: and the characteristics
J.B.: and that recognition is fairly recent
L.M.: Cause I think our expectations was also to encounter this more in a private archive then in the public archive. The public archive would be much more reglamented in a way that this subjective position would kind of feid or like would not be the present
S.B.: But become more institutionalised
L.M. : Yes
S.B.: But then this was interesting, because in the British Museum, the lady, who is in charge of the administrative archive, was talking about how in the 70s archiving practises changed to become more about access, to become more open
J.B.: yes
S.B.: And then she said that it was a little bit more disorganised and one of her predecessors had thrown out a box with records without asking. And then, actually, after our visit to the Tate there was this article in the Guardian, that basically said that a photographic archive from the Tate had just been thrown out in the skip and it was taken out by someone else who had been given an anonymous call to pick it up. And they mentioned that the same thing had happened in the V&A, and we found this interesting in the sense of the subjective archivist in taking/ making these kind of executive decisions with information and records that are essentially public
J.B.: but then it's down to responsibility, whose responsibility is it..
S.B. : Right..
J.B.: The archivist takes on their a responsibility and maybe the archivist feels that they are allowed to have that responsibility, because they have been trained, or they are nominally an expert in this field, but you know, all people are human, and mistakes are made. I am not going to say that mistakes haven't been made and mistakes will be made. But again, now you are moving in this sort of ideas of authority and trust, which is another big area, where archivists are looking at the moment, this idea of, you know, this part and parts of this idea of subjectivity of the archivist. The power of the archivist is the idea that they are regarded in some ways as an authority, so for example, there have been cases in the past where, I think it was at the Tate, I can't remember, but an artist who was also a forger was inserting material providing evidence that his paintings were sort of not forgeries, into archive material. Because the fact that it was within this archive, gave it authority. So, there is this idea that by the very nature of being within an archive gives it some kind of guarantee of authenticity. And authenticity is another concept that archivist are very interested in. We see it as our role to sort of, still, to guard the authenticity of the material. To ensure that their authenticity cannot be questioned in a way. So, it is all very mixed up
S.B.: It is pretty heavy, cause I mean it is a lot of responsibility, if you think. When you talk about the idea of provenance and original order, this notion that the archive reflects the structures and hierarchies at play, like, I mean, that's quite loaded, isn't it?
J.B.: Yea. Power is in there all the time and we do recognise that now. So, I don't know, it is very difficult .
J.B.: I was going to tell you about the continuum model. So you know about the live cycle model. LIve cycle model has probably been fairly prevalent in about the 50s. I think, I probably have to tell you a bit about the appraisal as well, to make any sense. So talking about Jenkinson. Jenkinson first published his manual in 1922, but he was working through to the 30s and 40s. He worked in the National Archives or the Public Record offices it was then for a while, so he was a practising archivist. He was also instrumental in founding the course here, so professional education for archivists at university level started sort of post-second world war and Jenkinson was instrumental first starting the course here, but there were courses at Liverpool at sort of very similar time 1947, something like that. Anyway, Jenkinson, is a very important figure and as I said, he was very keen on this idea of objectivity, this idea of passive guardian of the truth. And one way in which he sort of followed through on that, was that he did not see or he tried to minimise as much as possible the role of the archivist in selecting which records came to the archive.
This idea of organic whole again. If this organic whole comes to you as an archivist, you should respect it, you should recognise it as such, and it is not for you to start, you know, chopping bits of it, so to speak. It's cause that would then damage this idea of its organic nature, as an organic entity. His feeling was that it is the sort of administrators of the record, again, we are very much in a governmental, kind or, organisational aspect, thats were Jenkinson was. They can read it, because they are doing in a sort of natural way, but the archivist should not be involved in the appraisal and they should not be involved in making decision about what to keep and about what not to keep, they just deal with what they get. So that was kind of, you know, logical in a way, because it does fit in with his idea that we are sort of this objective, neutral outsider , we know the third party, we are not involved in that sort of thing. So it kind of work, but of course that was completely unsustainable and it probably never happened even at the time and so by the 1950s in America this time, so we have moved to America. A man called Schellenberg, who is another seminal figure in the history of archival theory, he is sort of seen as the father of selection and also the father of records management, because he did see a role in this idea, he saw that a decision had to be made about what to keep and what not to keep. You know, volumes of records were increasing, there were so much backlog, there were huge piles of records, so you sort of had to make a decision, you had to decide what to keep and what not to keep. And he does, sort of, talk about appraisal and this idea of selection and he comes up with the taxonomy of values to help him make this decision. But of course, the other thing that happens once you sort of make this split, is you start to get things on either side of the split. So if you have made this decision what to keep in an archive and what not to keep in an archive, that indicates that there is an archive on this side and also something else on this side. You sort of get this idea of records management coming in, at this time as well. So, your records manager operates within the organisation. Your records manager manages the records for the use of the business. At some point a decision is made when this material is no longer of use to the business: do we need to keep it or do we not? And if we need to keep it, it goes into the archive and if we don't keep it, we just throw it away. So this is sort of evolution here, this is why we now talk about archives and records management. This is where the life cycle comes from, so you have current records, probably under the … records manager , semi-current records, … records manager, non-current records, that's when the decision is made and at that point they are either consigned to it and he just used these terms, and they are either consigned to heaven, archival heaven or sort of, the bin, the hell. That's where the life cycle comes in. It comes in the 50s and it comes with this idea of appraisal and selection. The taxonomy of values ..
You have primary value, which is value to the organisation … purposes, secondary value, which is value to other people apart from the creators so to speak , then you have that divided into evidential value and informational value and that's his taxonomy of values, and that's were archives where for a very long time, until about, I don't know, 90s, maybe. And in the 1990s the life cycle was sort of challenged in a way as a model by what is known as a continuum model. Which is developed this time in Australia. So we are going around the globe and the interesting thing is that Schellenberg actually went on a lecture tour of Australia. So there is that sort of an interconnection. but again Australians found themselves in a different context , you know, they were relatively young country and so they were in a slightly different context.
To be continued...