The field of Archives is one that, in one form or another, goes back thousands of years involving the preservation and storage of religious and state records in the regions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome, as well as other civilizations. The history of modern archiving is an outgrowth of the changing nature of government and learning starting in the late Middle Ages and developing throughout the Renaissance and Enlightenment era.
Archival development was spurred by the increase in the need for expanding governments to maintain records, and the growth of learning during the period resulting from the literacy of the Reformation and the development of the movable type printing press. This resulted in a proliferation in the amount of material needed to be preserved.
By the early nineteenth century, the needs of the industrial revolution, and the government bureaucracy of newly created democratic states, had resulted in the formation of formal archives and the beginnings of the practices now thought of as the core principles of archival science.
It was in this climate, that in 1831, the French government instituted the policy at the Archives National of “respect des fonds” which required all materials to be organized by its point origin. By 1881 the Prussian State Archives adopted more precise regulations that included the concepts of “Provenance” and “Original Order”. Provenance represents the policy of keeping track of the chain of ownership through which an item has passed since its creation. Original Order is the concept of maintaining materials as they were arranged, either at the time they were received by the institution, or preferably, the order that was maintained by the original owner which is crucially important to the aspect of historical preservation. These concepts form the basis on which archival science is founded.
By using these techniques of organization, archivist seek to provide primary source materials in a format that allows for access by researchers, while preserving the material in an as close to original state as possible, so as to maintain its historical integrity, so that future generations might draw their own conclusions.
In order that the materials organized by the archives to be there for future generations, the profession has been at the forefront of the field of preservation and restoration of physical media such as paper, photographs, and film. A new focus has been on the preservation of the new digital media forms and the determination of how long such materials last in storage or without maintenance.
In recent years, due to the information revolution and the increase in sharing of information, it has come to the attention of archivist that the need was now there to begin and develop standards for archival description to be used across the profession. This was necessary because archives developed methods of organization individual to the needs of each institution. An archive, unlike other library institutions, primarily consist of very rare and unique items for which few if any other institution would have a copy, on top of this, archives are not lending institution, and so have had no need to furnish outsiders with copies of their finding aids.
Archivists have also had a need to rethink the basis on which criteria for the determination of what is to be saved, and what is to be disposed of, when organizing new collections. In the past, material by men, and individuals of the dominate ethnic, racial, or religious persuasions were given priority. Their writings were considered by archivist of the time, somehow, more important than those of less well represented groups. Modern archivists have been working to redress this issue as they develop new collection for their institutions.
Archival Science will continue to be an important component of the larger Library and Information Science field as the ever increasing amount of collected data produces works that must be preserved for the use of future generations.
Sources
Dority, G. K. (2006). Rethinking information work : a career guide for librarians and other information professionals. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.
The America Society of Archivist Standards for Archival Description: A Handbook Compiled by Victoria Irons Walch for the Working Group on Standards for Archival Description with contributions by Marion Matters. World Wide Web version created by Stephen Miller. http://www.archivists.org/catalog/stds99/index.html
The Society of American Archivists: Description and Brief History
9 comments:
Looking around online I stumbled on an article that outlined some of the difficulties archivists were having in regards to digital content preservation, specially web content. One of the problems facing the profession is the ambiguity of the content itself. Archives traditionaly dealt with concrete items (a book, a photograph, etc), but when it comes to preserving web content, the boundaries are not as clear - mainly because web content is linked to other content. Another problem highlighted by the article is the frequency with which such content must be preserved - web pages are constantly being created, but they are also frequently disappearing.
Some of the information is staggering - the Internet Archive, a project aimed at archiving digital content, has amassed so much information that if their archives were converted to pages, it would easily exceed the holdings of the Library of Congress.
West, J. Saving digital history. (2007). Library Journal (1976). Accession #: 200710601872002
In reading about archives, I am struck at how late in the game the US entered the archival world. It wasnt until the 1930's that as a nation, the United States decided to preserve its national identity. Since then records have poured in and it is almost like we are playing catch up with countries like France and Germany who began nationally archiving in the late 1800's.
Another area of archival studies I find fascinating is appraisal. Deciding what should be preserved and what should be discarded or destroyed is to me a profession of utmost importance.
Cox, Richard. Understanding Archives and Manuscripts. (2006) Society of American Archivists, Chicago, Illinois
Another aspect of how technology is affecting the archival profession is the ability to preserve items in a digital format. "Rethinking Information Work" states that "digitization is an increasing important method for preserving delicate or deteriorating resources".
I think it is great that technology is giving us a way to make these important items available a little longer.
Works Cited
Dority, G. Kim. Rethinking Information Work: A career guide for librarians and other information professionals. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2006.
This post is especially interesting to me for a few reasons. First, I would love to become an archivist. Second, I was an archaeology major in undergrad, and your first paragraph brought me back to my class about Mesopotamia, so I went back to my old textbook to see if there were any sort of correlations between those ancient methods of recordkeeping and the archiving of materials today.
One very interesting thing is the idea of standardization. When cuneiform was developed, each sign represented a single number or word (kind of like Chinese characters today). Since writing was first developed more as a means of recording business transactions, new written words had to be created to deal with other subjects. So, the people who created new words had to include clues as to the pronunciation of meaning for the new word. Sometimes they would just put two signs together (mouth + water = drink), but in later times (this is the same in Chinese) they would link a completely unrelated character to gives clues as to pronunciation. So that all of the people who could read and write could understand each other's materials, spelling and naming conventions had to be created, though those are unknown to us today.
On a generally unrelated note, has anyone heard of the Wayback Machine ?
This is a website that archives old webpages, including their designs. For example, this is what msn.com looked like in 1996: MSN
Google in 1998:
Google
The really great thing about this website is that it preserves not only the content but the exact format. This is what you would have seen in 1998 exactly.
I forgot to source my textbook!
Van De Mieroop, Marc A History of the Ancient Near East 2004, Blackwell Publishing
Behind public libraries, archives are what interest me most. My undergraduate career was focused on film and art, two subjects I have always been quite fond of. One of the most interesting things I've read about archives has to do with the difficulties of preparing the description of a visual work for cataloging purposes. With text, information is generally standard. In an art museum, works can be much more difficult to categorize.
For instance, the following description would be acceptable: "painting of a woman in a blue dress holding and looking at a baby."
However, "Mary and Jesus" or "love of a mother," would be incorrect. Both cross the line between description and interpretation. It would be easy to cross this line and not think twice, especially when considering extremely familiar works with widely known connotations attached.
This issue would never arise in a traditional library.
Taylor, Arlene. The Organization of Information. Westport, Connecticut: Libraries Unlimited, 2004.
Archival management is very interesting to me. The most important thing a country has is its history and that is what archives are. A record of a country's history.
One job I find especially tempting is a rare books librarian. On a tour of Detroit Public Library, we were treated to a viewing of some of their rare books. And they were amazing! Books with precious stones, with paintings on them, and books that are many many years old.A rare books librarian is responsible for "maintaining" with backrounds in "printing, publishing, and book preservations
(60). It would feel like such a prilvege to be able to preserve history like this for many generations to come. This would combine my love of books and history.
Works Cited
Dority, G. K. (2006). Rethinking Information Work A Career Guide For Librarians and Other Information Professionals. Westport: Libraries Unlimited
I will have to agree that archives is a very interesting field to explore. Archives is a place to find excellent primary source documents when researching. As a history major, I visited the Reuther Library and the Detroit Public Library and found the material fascinating. I had a research paper about the Detroit and found valuable resources within the two libraries. I also found myself looking at other documents and pictures that they had in their collections, I was so absorbed in all the information that they had, before I knew it, I had been there for over five hours looking at every and anything that was interesting. It was amazing to find the stuff they had in the collections, if you have not visited either of the libraries, one should do it if you are interested in the field.
With the digital age, we can now preserve some of the older stuff that is falling apart and will always have a record of it, even though the original would still be better. I really enjoy looking at old pictures and old documents that were written years ago. In the Reuther Library we got to see a document that was sent by Eleanor Roosevelt. There were pictures that were taken in the 20th century during the labor strikes. After all of the stuff that I had seen, I wanted more. If I ever went into the field, I would have to work with the rare documents and pictures.
Sources:
Dority, G.K. Rethinking Information Work: A career guide for librarians and Other Information Professionals. Westport: Libraries Unlimited, 2006.
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