Archival research - why is it important?

Michael Moss, HATII, University of Glasgow

(First published in Dunaskin News, November 2003)

We are told repeatedly that we live in the information age and work in a knowledge economy.  The rhetoric suggests we are experiencing a new dawn and yet many e-advocates make use of vocabulary, which is all too familiar such as registry, provenance, collections, text and so on ¹.  Archivists in Europe with one or two exceptions have been curiously reluctant to engage in discussions with the e-world and it has been left to a handful of academic librarians and archivists in Australia and North America to grapple with what are complex issues.  In every part of the world, however, archivists and records managers are daily confronted with digital material and e-practices, which deliberately seek to distance themselves from the paper order even though the information content is enduring.

Unless archivists wish simply to become a profession which pragmatically follows rules imposed by the e-world, which has shown itself to be not that interested in the ontology of information, then as a profession we must be actively engaged in research.  Exploring what Sarah Tyacke has called the ‘recordness of the record’ takes us beyond the e-world to equally profound threats to the information that we make available to our users from post-modernists and post-structuralists who challenge both its value and utility ².  It is no good retreating into arguments about happenstance as being the determining factor in survival as more often than not there is a complex causality.  This is the familiar world, at least to European scholars, of diplomatic, which Luciana Duranti has applied to modern documents and mode of approach employed by the Effective Records Management Project at Glasgow ³.

Engagement with the e-world and the post-modernists inevitably must lead to inquiry into the way in which information is ‘privileged’ by archivists, librarians and museum curators, however much we pretend our appraisal and cataloguing methods are objective ⁴.  There are many aspects to this question from theoretical issues such as determining ‘what a collection might be’ to the practical matter of how control vocabularies are constructed ⁵.  Any such discussions must involve well-constructed user evaluation which in turn must encompass the ‘inclusion agenda’, a worldwide phenomenon that has its own literature.

With the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), Glasgow is well placed to conduct research in the archives domain which places it in the wider context of the information sciences.  Three members of the University Archives staff are research fellows and other members of the HATII staff bring an unusually wide-breadth of multidisciplinary expertise, essential if such research is to flourish.  In any academic institution a spirit of enquiry must permeate service provision so that the one benefits the other and encourages undergraduate students to enter a stimulating profession by enrolling in HATII’s new MPhil programmes and even by embarking on doctoral studies.

Years ago I met a friend who had been a fellow archive student.  I said what are you doing now, she said she was now a ward sister in a teaching hospital.  I looked puzzled and she replied that she had read one of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books and encountered the Fillyjonk surrounded by ‘old paper and worry’.  That is me she said and became a nurse.  Research might just convert that worry into an exciting adventure.  Michael Buckland ends his recent article on library research by provocatively throwing down the gauntlet - ‘Areas within our interests that are important, but inadequately understood, need to be identified and researchers should be challenged to provide new insights using whatever techniques they can’ ⁶.  Archivists need to do the same.

1. See for example Researchers’ Use of Libraries and other Information Sources: current patterns and future trends - Final Report, 2002, available at: http://www.rslg.ac.uk/research/libuse/
2. Sarah Tyacke, ‘Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives’, Archivaria 52, Fall 2001, The Association of Canadian Archivists.
3. Luciana Dranti, ‘Diplomatics: new uses for old science’, in five parts, Archivaria, Vols. 28-33 (1989-92) and James Currall, Claire Johnston, Pete Johnson, Michael Moss and Lesley Richmond, 'No Going Back. Final Report of Effective Records Management Project', University of Glasgow, 2001, available at: http://www.gla.ac.uk/infostrat/ERM/Docs/
4. See Michael Buckland, Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto, 1992, available at: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Library/Redesigning/html.html
5. See Sanford Berman, Prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the Library of Congress subject heads concerning people, Metuchen, N.J., 1971.
6. Michael K Buckland, ‘Five Grand Challenges for Library Research’, Library Trends, vol. 51, no. 4, 2003.