Archive
Both libraries and archives are repositories collecting, storing, organizing, preserving and mediating documents for some purposes. The difference is that libraries are holding published documents, while archives are holding unpublished documents. Books and journals in a given library is just one copy out of many, whereas manuscripts and pictures in archives typically are unique.
Many libraries, in particular national libraries, are also performing archival functions as part of their overall purposes. Both libraries and archives (and museums) may be seen as kinds of information systems or memory institutions. They have, however, developed quite different principles for document description and -organization. In archives is the principle of provenance important.
"Although archives have existed for thousands of years, much of the archival paradigm—not unlike that of library science—coalesced between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several key treatises and manuals codifying archival theory and practice were published between 1830 . . . and 1956 . . . The most influential of these was the Manual on the Arrangement and Description of Archives, written in 1898 by Dutch archivists Muller, Feith, and Fruin, which brought together the French and Prussian ideas of respect des fonds and provenance. The translated manual was widely disseminated and was a major topic of discussion when librarians and archivists met for the first time for an international congress at the 1910 World's Fair in Brussels. As a result, the concept of provenance was adopted by the congress as the basic rule of the archival profession”. Gilliland-Swetland (2000; references omitted).
Bowker (2005) considers the word ‘‘archive’’ widely used to include all surviving traces of, or concerning, the past. All archives are highly selective. Leaving traces is a situated rhetorical activity, more or less unsatisfactory for audiences in other, later situations. Interpretation requires contextualizing knowledge that is often not available. Yet it is the imperfect archive of traces that alone can speak to us: ‘‘The archive’s jussive force, then, operates through being invisibly exclusionary’’ (p. 14). Memory practices use classification and standardization for efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, infrastructures filter knowledge of the past. Selective forgetting is a practical necessity and a political force. Archive, memory, and classification are tightly linked: ‘‘The tools that we have to think about the past with are the tools of our own archive – so that we project onto nature our modes of organizing our own affairs. . .’’ (p. 18).
Literature:
Archival Science. International Journal on Recorded Information. Netherlands: Springer. ISSN: 1389-0166 (print version). ISSN: 1573-7519 (electronic version).
Bowker, G. C. (2005). Memory Practices in the Sciences. The MIT Press.
Cook, M. (1986). The Management of Information from Archives. Hants, England: Gower.
Cooke, A. (1987). A code of ethics for archivists: some points for discussion.
Archives and Manuscripts, 15(2), 95-104.
Baynes-Cope, A. D. (1988). Thoughts on ethics in archival conservation. Restaurator, 9(3), 136-146.
Gilliland-Swetland, A. J. (2000). Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment. Washington D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub89/contents.html (Visited February 4, 2004)
Horn, D. E.
(1989). The development of ethics in archival practice. American
Archivist, 52(1), 64-71.
McDonald, L.
(1989). Ethical dilemmas facing an archivist in the business
environment: the constraints on a business archivist. Journal of the Society
of Archivists, 10(4), 168-172.
MacNeil, H. (1991). Defining the limits of freedom of enquiry: the ethics of disclosing personal information held in government archives. Archivaria, (32), 138-144.
Riberio, F. (2001). Archival Science and changes in paradigm. Archival Science, 1(3), 295-310.
Stockting, B. & Queyroux, F. (Eds.). (2006). Encoding
Across Frontiers: Proceedings of the European Conference on Encoded Archival
Description And Context (EAD And EAC), Paris, France, 7-8 October, 2004.
Haworth Information Press
Stoddart, M. (1990). Archival values -- what are they? Archifacts, 40-46.
Ulfsparre, A. C. (ed.). Arkivvetenskap. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Usherwood, B.; Wilson, K. & Bryson, J. (2005). Relevant repositories of
public knowledge? Libraries, museums and archives in ‘the information age’.
Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 37(2), 89-98.
See also: Provenance, principle of; Repositories of public knowledge
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 28-01-2007