The Archive Is A Foreign Country

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rspec tive
The Archive(s) Is a Foreign

Country: Historians, Archivists,
and the Changing Archival
Landscape
Terry Cook0
Abstract
Historians and archivists approach the documentary past differently, as they consider,
respectively, the archive (singular) and archives (plural). The former focuses on issues of
power, memory, and identity centered upon the initial inscription of a document (or series
of documents).The latter concentrates on the subsequent history of documents over time,
including the many interventions by archivists (and others) that transform (and change) that
original archive into archives. Despite making good common cause in lobbying over public
policy and initially sharing values based on objective, scientic history, the two professions
have drifted apart in recent decades. This essay explores the reasons for this divergence by
analyzing the history of the two professions and highlighting resulting misconceptions that
Terry Cook.
Editors note: This essay was originally published in the Canadian Historical Review vol. 90, no. 3,
(September 2009), the Canadian equivalent to the American Historical Review. The first half of the essay
is intended especially for an audience of professional and academic historians in Canada. Although this
first section may seem familiar to archivists who know Cooks writings, it summarizes the scholarship
about the Archive (singular and often capitalized, as a concept in critical theory) and hypothesizes that
this scholarship does not engage archivists or our literature because these external writers about the
archive think that nothing happens in the archives (plural and lower case, our institutions and profession). In the second section, Cook lays out a research agenda for the history of records and archives,
research that I hope American archivists will undertake in the spirit of this years seventy-fifth anniversary
of the Society of American Archivists. With the exception of editing for conformity to style, the article
has not been altered by either the author or the editor. I am grateful that Terry Cook allowed me to
reprint this article to make it more broadly available.
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blind both to deeper nuances of the multiple contexts surrounding records that may enhance
their understanding and use. It concludes that archives are not unproblematic storehouses
of records awaiting the historian, but active sites of agency and power. Until recently, it has
been in the interests of both professions to deny (or at least not interrogate) the subjectivity
of archives. Both professions could benet signicantly, therefore, from a renewed partnership
centered upon the history of the record to produce better history.
he archivist-historian relationship is critically important to enabling

(and sometimes compromising) many aspects of historical research.
This relationship has been central as well to dening the identity of both
professions since their modern genesis in the nineteenth century. Yet this symbiotic interaction remains largely unexplored in the literature of historians,
leading to misunderstandings between two professions that should be natural
allies. This failure is especially surprising because the archive has been the
subject of an outpouring of stimulating writing by historians (and many others)
in the past decade. The archive (singular) is usually engaged by such scholars
as a metaphoric symbol, as representation of identity, or as the recorded memory production of some person or group or culture. But there seems little awareness (with rare exceptions) of the history of the archive, from after that initial
creation or inscription to its appearance in the archival reference room, or of
the internal concepts and processes that animate actual archivists working inside
real archives (note plural), or of the distinct body of professional ideas and
practice those archivists follow, or of the impact all this has on shaping both the
surviving record and historical knowledge. This essay seeks to break these
silences by analyzing the character of this relationship over its mutual and then
diverging histories, the resulting concepts, and recent radical changes in the
archival landscape.
Over three decades ago, in 1975, archivists in English Canada withdrew as a
formal section of the Canadian Historical Association to form the independent
Association of Canadian Archivists. Since that time, the archival profession in
Authors note: A shorter version of this long-gestating essay was initially presented as the opening keynote
address to the rst biennial International Conference on the History of Records and Archives, held in
Toronto in 2003, and reworked versions again in 20072008 as the rst W.F.M. Stewart Lecture at the
University of Calgary, and to the Society of Archivists, Ireland, in Dublin; to the Archive Fervour /Archive
Further: Literature, Archives, and Literary Archives conference in Aberystwyth, Wales; and The
Philosophy of the Archive conference, Edinburgh, Scotland. Many valuable comments were received
from Sharon Anne Cook, University of Ottawa; Tim Cook, Canadian War Museum; Tom Nesmith,
University of Manitoba; and Joan M. Schwartz, Queens University. Their welcome suggestions, as with
those of the CHRs three anonymous reviewers, have allowed me to improve the essay signicantly.
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English Canada has ourished.1 Its principal scholarly journal, Archivaria, has
had a major impact on national and international thinking about archives.
The very existence of its thousands of pages, joined by a score of other peerreviewed archival journals in the English-speaking world alone, is evidence of
a rejuvenated discipline with a rapidly expanding body of knowledge. New
programs for graduate education in archival studies inaugurated in Canada in
the 1980s and 1990s both reect and encourage this disciplinary expansion;
their masters degrees have since become the de facto entry-level requirement
for employment as professional archivists in most archival institutions in
the country.2 New alliances have been formed with records managers and
information technology specialists on the one hand, and with librarians
and museum curators on the other, while the traditional historian-archivist
bond has faded as somewhat pass. In turn, historians (again, with those
rare exceptions) have lost touch with many changes affecting the four core
archival functions of appraisal and acquisition; arrangement, processing, and
description; preservation; and public programming of the very primary sources
central to both professions, to say nothing of the demographic, economic, and
technological challenges facing todays archives.3
This distancing between historians and archivists has occurred despite
sharing common intellectual and professional roots in the nineteenth century,
and much common development since. Indeed, until the past few decades,
the overwhelming majority of Canadian archivists were educated in history,
supplemented by some on-the-job training and a four-week specialized course
in archival methods. Archivists participated actively in the Canadian Historical
The Archives Section of the Canadian Historical Association was a vibrant group publishing its own
newsletter and journal, and holding sessions as an integral part of the CHA annual conference.
Archivists in Quebec had earlier formed, for French-language archivists, the Association des Archivistes
du Qubec in 1967, with its own journal, Archives. After much debate, the Association of Canadian
Archivists accordingly formed as an English-language rather than as a bilingual association. The two
archival associations remain separate in linguistic solitude, but co-operate for common cross-Canada
purposes through the Bureau of Canadian Archivists, which is composed of senior representatives
from both associations. This essay is limited to exploring archival ideas in English-speaking Canada,
with related international perspectives; its conclusions may also reect more the experiences in large
and mid-sized archival institutions.
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Masters-level degrees in archival studies are now offered (from west to east) at British Columbia,
Manitoba (jointly with Winnipeg), Toronto, Montreal, McGill, and Laval, four in conjunction with
library and information sciences schools, two (Manitoba and Laval) in conjunction with history or
heritage departments. There are offerings of stand-alone archival courses in several library schools,
but these do not meet the Association of Canadian Archivists educational guidelines for a full-time,
two-year, postgraduate degree. In addition, there are diploma and certicate programs for archival
technicians offered by several community colleges, indicating that the work of the archival assistant
now is also increasingly complex.
The two-part article by New Brunswick archivist Fred Farrell, The Changing Face of Archives: Will
You Recognize Us? in the Canadian Historical Associations Bulletin 33 (2007) suggests by its very
title this interprofessional gap. Farrells columns report on the demographic, political, technological,
and funding crises besetting archival institutions today, rather than the historian-archivist
relationship per se.
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Association, as long-time editors of its journal and Historical Booklet series, as

members of its executive board, and as regular conference attendees. Historians
in turn were the most identiable of archives researcher clientele, if not the
most numerous compared to genealogists. Yet perhaps the very closeness of
that century-long historian-archivist relationship fostered perceptions in both
professions that now hinder understanding the realities of archives and forging
closer partnerships with each other. And so, this essay argues, the archive(s) has
become a foreign country for historians.
So designating the archive consciously references David Lowenthals much
acclaimed book, The Past Is a Foreign Country. Lowenthal took his title from
L. P. Hartleys novel, The Go-Between, which begins with these lines: The past is
a foreign country, they do things differently there.4 Lowenthal argues that this
idea of a sharp distinction between past and present dates from the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Before that time, the past and present seemed similar
places rather than foreign countries. Past events were believed to be animated
by the same passions that governed their present-day equivalents. A past so
perceived became a rich source of examples for discerning universal notions of
morality and virtue, and their opposites. Many in that earlier era certainly drew
inspiration from the past, especially from the classical antiquity of Greece and
Rome, for their own art and sculpture, philosophy and literature, rhetoric and
architecture. But they felt no great need to preserve the actual artifacts from
that past. Indeed, many such artifacts lay crumbling in ruins, often despoiled
or ransacked, or, if collected, done so only, as Lowenthal rightly notes, as an
antiquarian, quirky, episodic pursuit.5
With the nineteenth century, this attitude toward the past changed
dramatically. Because of the revulsion (symbolized by Romanticism) felt
toward the dirty, crowded present of the Industrial Revolution, especially
when contrasted with idealistic notions of a chivalrous medieval past; because
of the sharp separation of the past (ancien regime) from the present that was
both raison detre and vivid legacy of the French Revolution; and because
of the post-Napoleonic nationalisms springing up across Europe that sought
continuity and legitimacy in long-distant historical roots for their region or
locality, nineteenth-century observers came to view the past, Lowenthal asserts,
as a place quite different from the present. Attitudes toward the preservation
of artifacts from that past consequently shifted radically as well, from the
antiquarian to the professional, from passive neglect to active collecting.
This collecting mentalit was also inuenced by a growing nineteenth-century
empiricism that venerated facts, statistics, and the scientic method, manifested
4
L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953), cited in David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), xvi. The novel was made into a well-received lm in 1971.
Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, xvixvii, and passim.
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in part through the enormous public interest in collecting natural specimens

and their detailed classication and display.6 The new and appealing technology
of photography paralleled this development, by creating the illusion that
one could captureor collectlifes reality with factual precision through
visually truthful images.7 Growing imperial consciousness in Europe similarly
led to the systematic collecting of colonial facts and artifacts as a means, when
presented to citizens at home, of conrming the mastery and superiority of
the imperial center, of dening the other in contrast to the self.8 Even the
then-popular hand-copying of overseas documents to ll nascent archives and
historical societies in Canada and the United States was likewise an attempt
to collect and re-present the past in forms more accessible for historians and
other writers.9
This new collecting mentalit and reverence for a distant past led to the
establishment in Western countries of public museums, galleries, libraries,
archiveseven zoosas major state institutions to preserve artifacts, specimens,
images, books, and records. Such accumulations were previously almost
exclusively the private purview of monarchs, the church, interested aristocrats,
or inspired (often eccentric) private enthusiasts. The collections now housed in
these new nineteenth-century public institutions represented both a democrati
zation of culture and an exertion of social control over popular taste.10 In all
these developments, Lowenthal concludes, noting the irony, If recognizing
the pasts difference promoted its preservation, the act of preserving made
that difference still more apparent. Venerated as a fount of communal identity,
cherished as a precious and endangered resource, yesterday became less and
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As entrees to this large eld, see Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 18201870 (London: Cape,
1980); George Emery, Fact of Life: The Social Construction of Vital Statistics, Ontario 18691952 (Montreal
and Kingston: McGill Queens University Press, 1993); and Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact:
Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
See Joan M. Schwartz, Records of Simple Truth and Precision: Photography, Archives, and the
Illusion of Control, Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): 140.
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed.
(London: Verso, 1991), especially chap. 10; and Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and
Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993). The extensive work of Ann Laura Stoler is very suggestive; for
a good introduction and many cross-references, see her Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,
in Archives, Records, and Power, ed. Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, special issues, Archival Science:
International Journal on Recorded Information 2(2002): 87109.
For examples, see Ian E. Wilson, A Noble Dream: The Origins of the Public Archives of Canada,
Archivaria 15 (Winter 19821983): 1635; and Randall Jimerson, American Historians and European
Archival Theory: The Collaboration of J. F. Jameson and Waldo G. Leland, Archival Science 6, nos. 34
(2006): 299312.
10
For these themes in the evolution of museums, see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History,
Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). Compare, as but two examples of many possible, Michael
H. Harris, History of Libraries in the Western World, 4th ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1999); and
R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the
Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
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less like today.11 The very act of archiving, then, ensured that the past was
perceived as different from the present, more foreign than familiar, and,
equally, that the archiving act itself imbued the newly collected and accessible
documents with different meanings and, accordingly, different uses.
In this new nineteenth-century perception of a distinctive past worth
preserving, re- creating, and retelling, both professional history and professional
archives were born, and both were soon suffused with self-identifying
mythologies. This archives-history and archivist-historian relationship seems
worth probing in some detail, for there are signicant assumptions on both
sides of the equation that blur important nuances about the past. These
misunderstandings mean that both professions approach records with less
subtlety than is desirable for producing the best archives and the best history.
Since the professional separation of archivists and historians in Canada in the
1970s, an unhealthy divergence has occurred between the two professions,
despite lobbying together on such public policy issues as privacy, copyright,
electronic/digital records, opening the historical census records, or the future
of Library and Archives Canada. This essay, then, reects on the archiveshistory relationship since the early nineteenth century, explores the evolution
of Canadian archival ideas in recent decades, and suggests possibilities for
fruitful cross-professional interaction to counter that divergence and improve
accordingly work by both archivists and historians.
The argument here is that the archive(s) is a foreign country to many
historians. Of course, it is one that they visit frequentlybut perhaps mainly
as tourists passing through, focusing on their guidebooks, intent on capturing
appealing views, but overlooking their surroundings, not talking to the local
inhabitants about what they do, thus failing to understand the countrys real
character and animating soul. And might archivists in their present rush to
standardization, digitization, and outreach programs stressing numbers of
hits and clients rather than substance also be changing into rather general
tour guides less suitable for such specialist visitors (as historians), content to
lead the tourists to the obvious, the well known, the visually appealing, the easy
11
Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, xvixvii. Also supporting and expanding Lowenthals arguments,
as summarized here, are Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and
Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Donald R. Kelley,
in his Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), warns that these divisions between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views of history were
not rigid: some later trends were foreshadowed, and some earlier patterns lingered in changed environments. From the archival perspective, there was by archivists a similar blurring across time, for
there were active collectors of rare manuscripts, maps, and prints from the Renaissance onward, and
some pre-nineteenth-century archival methods had been articulated, such as diplomatics, for distinguishing between authentic records and forgeries. But the state-based public nature of archival work
in the nineteenth century, and its professionalization and methodological articulation, mark a fundamental shift in attitude and activity, and soon followed in articulated theory, making Lowenthals
interpretation still convincing.
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to locate, the popular or politically correct, but less willing, or now, in some
cases, less able, to take visitors off the beaten path to the back roads where the
real country may be experienced? If the past was perceived in the nineteenth
century as a foreign place by both professions, the treatment accorded to that
past has likewise diverged into foreign spaces.
Nothing marks this divergence more starkly than the archival function
of appraisal. As archivists appraise records, they are doing nothing less than
determining what the future will know about its past: who will have a continuing
voice and who will be silenced. Archivists thereby co-create the archive. Archival
appraisal decides which creators, functions, and activities generating records
will be represented in archives, by dening, identifying, then selecting which
documents and which media become archives in the rst place. Appraisal is
also the gateway function to all subsequent archival activity. Once records are
appraised as having archival value and are acquired or protected by the archival
institution, even being in that privileged state does not ensure their equal
treatment thereafter. They are continually reappraised for their value when
the archivist decides, against the realities of huge backlogs, limited resources,
and pressing external and professional demands, which records are to enjoy
all or many or only some of numerous subsequent archival processes, more or
less in the following sequential order: placing the records into more logical
arrangements and groupings; providing varying levels of technical processing
for machine-dependent lm and sound archives and for computer-generated
digital records; analyzing series or groupings of records to highlight the salient
people, places, ideas, and events, in the mere paragraph or two of a typical
archival description, for a series of records that may contain a million pages
or a thousand images; creating for some few records more detailed catalogs,
listings, or nding aids or specialized or thematic guides; furnishing conserva
tion services and stabilization of the physical recording media; implementing
migration (especially for audio-visual and digital records) to new storage
media and new viewing or software platforms as old environments deteriorate
or become obsolete; storing in premium environmental conditions or less
so; copying for preservation or diffusion by microlming or digital scanning;
and nallyand the function most directly visible to researchersdeciding
(through many complex processes, including the archivists own education
and experience) which of all these already heavily ltered records, by choices
made by all the preceding processes, should now be featured in exhibitions (inhouse and online), publications, educational outreach programs, specialized
reference service guides, or as online nding aids and digitized images of actual
documents. And that same initial archival appraisal decides, with nality, which
records are to be destroyed, excluded from the archives and thus from all these
subsequent archival processes and enhancements, thereby effectually removed
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from societal memory, from the archive. By this appraisal process, to come to
the harsh bottom line, about 1 to 5 percent of the total available documentation
of major institutions is preserved, and an even smaller percentage from the
totality of records of all possible private citizens, groups, and organizations.12
Appraisal as a function challenges most fundamentally historians stereotypes and archivists self-perceptions (at least traditionally) about the archivists
role in society.13 If archivists are now rarely depicted as aged antiquarians
stooped over piles of ledgers in dusty basements, they are not perceived as
constructing social memory to reect contemporary needs, values, and
assumptions; that is the role of historians and other users of the archive. Rather,
the archivist is viewed by historians as a kind of honest broker, or informed
tour guide, between the original creators of the record and its later use by
researchers. This perception is not surprising, since archivists through the
nineteenth and much of the twentieth century have depicted themselves as
just such guardians of the documentary past, not as its ongoing co-creators.
Indeed, archivists in Britain until very recently were called keepers to reect
this curatorial mindset. The rst major archival theorist writing in English,
Hilary Jenkinson of the Public Record Ofce in London, best articulated early
in the twentieth century this guardian or keeper role as the archival ideal.14
In discussing the possibility of the archivist doing historical work, Jenkinson
offered this telling reection later in life: [The archivist] will almost certainly
make from time to time interesting [historical] discoveries and must some
times be allowed the pleasure of following them up, in off hours, himself. The
appropriate motto seems to be . . . Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth
out the corn: we must allow him . . . a few mouthfuls; while reminding him that
his primary duty is to tread; and hoping that he will not, in the process, tread
on any, or many, toes.15 Jenkinsons self-describing metaphor is disturbing in
characterizing the actual archival work itself as mere treading, remembering
that an ox is a castrated bull designed for tedious work, and that the term
in popular parlance denotes someone who is clumsy and dull, if solid and
reliable. Canadas rst dominion archivist, Douglas Brymner, revealed a similar
12
For a historical overview of the evolution of concepts and strategies for appraisal, see Terry Cook,
Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice: Origins, Characteristics, and Implementation in Canada,
19502000, Archival Science 5, nos. 24 (2005): 10161.
13
On the history of modern archival ideas, including many sources relating to these broad assertions that
follow, see Terry Cook, What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future
Paradigm Shift, Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997): 1763.
14
Jenkinsons major tome, A Manual of Archive Administration, appeared in 1922, was revised and updated
in 1937, and is very widely cited and honored in archival discourse.
15
Hilary Jenkinson, The English Archivist: A New Profession, in Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson,
ed. Roger H. Ellis and Peter Walne (1980), cited in Tom Nesmith, Seeing Archives: Postmodernism
and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives, American Archivist 65 (Spring/Summer 2002): 28.
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mindset, when designating the work he did arranging archival records as

purely mechanical, requiring no special qualications.16
This curatorial, neutered, and self-deprecating professional mindset held
by archivists continued its grip well past the classic period of shaping archival
theory. Until the 1980s, at least in Canada, archivists were often termed the
handmaidens of historians.17 In retrospect, that phrase is astonishing
for its servility and its gender connotations. Yet it carries insight too. Just as
women, until the past generation, were largely invisible in historical memory,
relegated to being the silent and usually unrecognized supporters of male
accomplishment, so too archivists have remained invisible in the construction
of social memory, their role poorly articulated and rarely appreciated, their
self-image equally passive. Just as patriarchy needed women to be subser
vient, invisible handmaidens to maintain male power, so historians required
archivists to be neutral, invisible partners of historical research to maintain
unchallenged the central professional assumptions of historians. The father of
modern scientic objective history, Leopold von Ranke, made this gendered
connotation very explicit: He described an archival collection he was using as
absolutely a virgin. I long for the moment I have access to her . . . whether
she is pretty or not. He saw archival documents as so many princesses,
possibly beautiful, all under a curse and needing to be saved. A nineteenthcentury French historian, approaching archives to do research, spoke of being
determined to force open the doors and thrust past the keepers of the harem.
The notion of the archives as virginal territory, a fetishism toward documents
bordering on the obsessive, was evident. One historian wondered how, in doing
archival research, he could avoid being seduced, intoxicated, and bewitched
by the issues whose essence oozes from these leather bindings and heaped-up
cartons. Of course, the point was to be so seduced; a team of French historians
wrote, on nding untouched archival documents, that every discovery induces
rapture.18 The need by historians, for methodological, epistemological, and
gender reasons, to have a nonproblematic, pure, virginal archive, ready for the
historian to discover and exploit, almost by denition required the archivist
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Report on Canadian Archives, 1889, cited in Nesmith, Seeing Archives, 28.
17
For an indication of this accepted handmaiden parlance, see Hugh A. Taylor, The Discipline of
History and the Education of the Archivist, in Imagining Archives: Essays and Reections by Hugh A.
Taylor, ed. Terry Cook and Gordon Dodds (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 2003), 52; or his book review
in Archivaria 9 (Winter 19791980): 23435. Taylor was the leading Canadian archival thinker of his
generation from the 1970s to 1990s.
18
All examples and citations are from Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical
Research (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 116, 124. Whether the handmaiden
motif has been discarded (in addition to the factors that follow later in this essay) because of the substantial shift in the gender composition in the past quarter century of both the historical and archival
professions, from overwhelmingly male to majority female, would be worthy of investigation, but that
is beyond the scope of this article.
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to be an invisible caretaker, a docile handmaiden, the harem-keeper of the

documentary virgins.
One of the rst to challenge this cumulative image of the passive, curatorial
archivist was W. Kaye Lamb, a past president of the Canadian Historical
Association and the fourth dominion archivist of Canada, as well as its rst
national librarian. As a well-respected archivist and historian, Lamb saw clearly
the misconceptions across the historian-archivist divide. He chided historians
in 1963 for likening the work of archivists to a vacuum cleanera remark . . .
intended to be complimentary, within limits, . . . to commend the industry and
thoroughness with which we hunted out material and brought it all together.
But there . . . our abilities ended. Really important things began to happen
only when some historian opened the bag of the vacuum cleaner, sorted out its
contents, and made intelligent use of the good things he found there. Lamb
complained that, to many historians, the archivist was essentially a hack: a
hewer of wood and a drawer of water. He collects things, cleans them, catalogues
them, puts them on shelves, and eventually takes some of them off shelves and
puts them on a table when a historian wants them. All this is true enough, but
it neglects entirely those aspects of the archivists job that call for intelligence,
knowledge, and judgment to such a degree that the assignment can be a little
frightening. What frightened Lamb, coming back full circle to the argument
being presented here, was the archival function of appraisal:
Out of a vast mass of material, a high percentage of which must be destroyed,
he must try to identify and retain those items that are most likely to be of interest and signicance in the years to come. Unlike the historian, the archivist
cannot place any convenient subjective limitation on his eld of interest.
Somehow or other he must nd means to pass judgment on the probable
value of source material that may relate to virtually any aspect or period of the
history of the state or country with which his institution happens to be con
cerned. . . . Sources can wait for the historian for years, but if they are to be
there to await his pleasure, some archivist may have to make up his mind in a
19
hurry and act quickly in order to secure and preserve them.
Such appraisal, and especially the concomitant destruction of all other

records not selected, was as frightening to historians as it was to Lamb.20 That
archivists are continually making such judgments may account for the historical
19
W. Kaye Lamb, The Archivist and the Historian, American Historical Review 68 (January 1963): 39293.
For an extended analysis of Lambs archival ideas, their implementation at the Public Archives of
Canada, and in turn across English Canada, see Terry Cook, An Archival Revolution: W. Kaye Lamb
and the Transformation of the Archival Profession, Archivaria 60 (Fall 2005): 185234.
20
For a classic statement of historians nervousness over Lambs new emphasis on appraisal and destruction, see C. P. Stacey, The Public Archives of Canada at the End of Its First Century, Historical Papers
(1972): 1122. See, too, the critiques offered by historians Joy Parr, Case Records as Sources for
Social History, Archivaria 4 (Summer 1977): 12236; and Veronica Strong-Boag, Raising Clios
Consciousness: Womens History and Archives in Canada, Archivaria 6 (Summer 1978): 7082.
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professions sense of denial, or at least its failure to engage with the archival
profession on matters of archival substance.
This idea among historians of an invisible or natural or nonproblematic
archive has long roots, going back to the rise of the new professional historian
of the nineteenth century and the development of a scientic approach to
researching and writing history. These new historians eschewed the grand
historical narratives typical of a Gibbon, a Macaulay, or a Carlyle, who dipped
into archives only to supplement memoirs and literary sources when writing
their magisterial tomes. That older history was viewed more as literature,
as sweeping morality plays rather than dispassionate analyses based on fact;
such histories were a manifestation of the very conation of past and present
that David Lowenthal delineated for that earlier period. By contrast, the new
scientic or professional history, best represented by von Ranke (despite his
documentary princesses), tried to re- create life in the past as it really was
through rigorous scholarship, debate in the university graduate seminar, and the
full immersion by the historian in archives. This new historical scholarship was
especially centered on a self-consciously objective methodology of examining
exhaustively all relevant archival sources in order to discover the facts about
the past. As one scholar summarizes the new professional historians mindset,
Historical facts are seen as prior to and independent of interpretation: the
value of an interpretation is judged by how well it accounts for the facts; if
contradicted by the facts, it must be abandoned. . . . Whatever patterns exist in
history are found, not made. 21
Animated by such assumptions, the new historian required, almost by
denition, a nonproblematic archive, one that accumulated organically,
without interference or mediation by the archivist, beyond the limited
curatorial and cleaning activities, such as Lamb mentioned. If records
in archives were the critical portal to discovering the facts about the past,
then the archive certainly could not be acknowledged as the product of the
subjective process of archival appraisal, or of active interventions by archivists
to shape and reshape the meaning of records in all the other subsequent
archival activities across the never-ending life (dare I say, the history) of its
documentary holdings. Of course, the new professional historians did not
take archival texts at face value: paleography, diplomatics, and source criticism
were mandatory topics of study in the new nineteenth-century history graduate
21
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Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2, and passim. Of course amateur historians with a large popular
appeal and writing on grand sweeping themes, such as George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, continued to exist in the nineteenth century alongside the new academic historians, but now they used primary documents much more in their narratives. It is fair to add, as Donald Kelley and others have
noted, that von Rankes reputation for extolling scientic objectivity in historical research was in part
a later construction projected on him to suit the needs and status of an evolving historical profession,
rather than an accurate reection of how von Ranke actually practiced his own historical research.
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seminars in order to test the veracity of the content, dating, and authorship of
individual documents, but there was no apparent concern about the archival
values, and processes that placed these documents within an archives in the
rst place and in front of the historian in a particular order, context, and
highlighted priority in the second.
This tradition continues to the present day. Even postmodernist his
torians rarely confront the mediated nature of archives as appraised and
selected records, as curatorial institutions, as professional activity, or as a
body of theoretical and practical knowledge. For example, in the past ten to
fteen years, there has been a tremendous outpouring of historical writing
on memory, on how societies commemorate the past through institutions,
media, and symbols that reinforce the power and identity of communities in
the present. These works range from analyses of historic sites to war memorials,
from commemorative events to public holidays, from theater, music, and lm
to cemeteries, antiques, and ruins. Equally, an impressive number of books
have been produced by historians that probe the founding, evolution, and
animating values of nineteenth-century museums, art galleries, libraries, and
zoos, all as state-sponsored, public institutions deeply engaged in constructing
cultural memory. And yet in this rich vein of writing, there are still very few
historians monographs that do the same for archivesdespite national, state,
and local archives being created, and then dened and shaped, at the very
same time as those other cultural institutions about which the postmodernist
historians were writing, and despite archives being the external cultural institu
tion with which historians are most familiar, that is, not counting their own
universities.22
This invisible archive is rarely engaged even by those scholars addressing
the theory or methodologies of historical research or the history of the historical
profession. Peter Novick, in his inuential 1988 book, That Noble Dream: The
Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, manages, over 629
pages of text, not to mention the role or impact of archives, and of the archival
choosing and subsequent (re)arrangement and description of historians source
material, as having an inuence on the question (or even possibility) of histori
cal objectivity.23 A study published in 1998 by seventeen Canadian historians,
On the Case: Explorations in Social History, is organized around a single question:
22
The shining exceptions to this rule are monographs by such medievalists and classicists as Michael
Clanchy, Patrick Geary, Jacques Le Goff, or James Sickinger, all, signicantly, addressing the history of
archives many centuries before 1800, when modern archives and modern professional history were
born.
23
By stark contrast, for an incisive theoretical consideration of the tension of the objectivity expectations
and subjectivity realities of historians and archivists, from an archival insider, see Hans Booms, Society
and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources, Archivaria
24 (Summer 1987): 69107 (originally in German in 1972); and also the extended discussion in Cook,
Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice.
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what is the value of case les in the practice of social history. Yet the book
contains no substantive reference to archival interventions, despite readily
available published literature by archivists on the theory and methodologies
underpinning the archival appraisal of case les, including their extensive
sampling and selecting methods, which obviously has a fundamental impact on
the shape and value of what remains for the historian to use.24 Donald Wrights
recent CHA booklet, The Canadian Historical Association: A History, virtually
ignores the substantial interaction of archivists with historians within the CHA:
in his analysis of the complaints (and occasional defections from the CHA)
of thematic subgroups of historians devoted to womens, military, national,
and similar elds of history, there is no discussion of the rst and biggest
such subgroup to leave the CHA (the archivists in 1975), no acknowledgment
that archivists for decades shaped and edited both the scholarly journal and
main booklet series for the association, and no hint that from 1945 to 1966
the CHA was a formal participant in the Public Records Committee approving
all archival appraisals and destruction recommendations for all records in the
federal government.25
In a very ne reective essay on historical practice that appeared in the
Canadian Historical Review in 1995, Joy Parr, one of Canadas leading gender
and social historians, quite rightly exhorts her colleagues to consider that
the process of historical meaning-making begins not as they write their books
and articles within some interpretive framework, but long before, from the
moment the archives boxes are opened and the documents therein are read
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24
Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds., On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998), quoted from introductory material and dust jacket. The oversight
was reinforced when the editors of the Canadian Historical Review convened a special CHR Forum to
discuss the book, inviting six participants: all historians and no archivists. In her probing review of the
book, archivist Carolyn Heald notes the symbolic irony of an archivist sorting case les being depicted
as the cover illustration of the book, without any analysis inside of what impact his work might have as
he acquires (or destroys) and describes case les for researchers; see Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999):
16164.
25
Donald Wright, The Canadian Historical Association: A History, CHA Historical Booklet no. 62 (Ottawa:
Canadian Historical Association, 2003). His related book, The Professionalization of History in English
Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), has more coverage of archives as site or sponsor
of historians own work, but not interrogated in their own right as shaping the very nature and possibilities of that professionalized history.
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with or against the grain.26 Fair enough, yet the picture is considerably more
stark than Parr paints. I would assert that a major act of determining historical
meaningperhaps the major actoccurs not when the historian opens the box,
but when the archivist lls the box, and, by implication, through the process of
archival appraisal, destroys the other 98 or 99 percent of records that do not get
into that or any other archival box. And, further, what of the layers of archival
interpretation animating arrangement and descriptionand the formative
assumptions underpinning these processesthat lead the historian, or not, to
the 1 or 2 percent of surviving records in that box, and all other relevant boxes;
and highlight, or do not, the complex interrelationships among creators of
records, their surrounding organizational cultures, patterns of contemporary
record communication and use, and the record-shaping characteristics of
information technologies and recording mediaall these deeply affecting the
meaning of the surviving records. All these knowledge lters reect in turn the
depth, quality, and presentation of the archivists own research into the records
many and continually altering contexts, and the social/cultural attitudes and
backgrounds of the archivistinto, in short, the records own history and the
archivists need and ability to unravel that history as the very foundation of
performing well all the archival functions and processes mentioned earlier.
Yet this evolving history of the archival record remains the great silence
between archivists and historians. The role of archivists as co-authors of that
history remains invisible. Since Jacques Derridas landmark volume Archive Fever
appeared in English in 1996, which brought the postmodern turn directly to
the archive(s), this odd silence has nally begun to break, at least at the rareed
level of journal literature and conference papers. Yet even so, the archive so
engaged is centered upon the original inscription, not the subsequent (includ
ing archival) history of the record. Even after Derrida, there is still expressed in
historiographical writing, as recently as 2007, the hope that, in contrast to the
often commercially driven archives appearing on websites that are evident[ly]
interpretive[,] . . . scholars who use professionally organized archives have
come to expect that archivists will make their data available in a disinterested
26
Parr, Gender, History and Historical Practice, 372. To her considerable credit, Parr is one of a single
handful of Canadian historians who have directly expressed historians concerns with the substance of
archival practices over the past thirty years; see her Case Records as Sources for Social History,
Archivaria 4 (Summer 1977): 12236. For a similar engagement, see Strong-Boag, Raising Clios
Consciousness. Another engaged historian has been Robert A. J. Macdonald, who challenged archivists assumptions and practices in Acquiring and Preserving Private Records: A Debate, Archivaria 38
(Fall 1994): 15557, 16263. Signicantly, such conversations addressing the substance of archivists
work (as opposed to public policy issues such as access and privacy, or hours of service) are rare and
occurred fteen to thirty years ago in the literature. A more recent Canadian exception to these generalizations is Tim Cooks Clios Warriors: Canadian Historians and the Writing of the World Wars (Vancouver:
UBC Press, 2006), which integrates the creation and control of documents (records management) and
their archival collecting (lling those boxes) with the impact this had on the subsequent writing of history. But then before becoming a military historian, Cook worked as an archivist at the National Archives
of Canada and saw rsthand the archival role in shaping the possibilities of historical writing.
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and non-directive wayevidently without interpretation.27 Even those historical

scholars who eschew such lingering visions of the archives as objective and who
challenge their fellow historians comparative silence about the personal,
structural, and political pressures which the archive places on the histories
they end up writingas well as those they do not; and who argue eloquently
instead for seeing the archives as constructed and contested exercises in power
and exclusion, the very processes of which shape all the narratives which
are to be found there, even these sensitive writers still exclude any serious
consideration of the archive from inside the archives.28
In summary, despite the impressive external theorizing on the archive in
recent historical writing, what is still missing is the voice of the archivist, who,
after all, is the principal actor in dening, choosing, and constructing the archive
that remains, and then in representing and presenting that surviving archival
trace to researchers. Given the sensitivity of many of those same historians to
the past marginalization from history of women, certain ethnic groups, the
working classes, or First Nations peoples, it is all the more surprising that such
historians studying the archive have marginalized the archivist. Can one imagine
writing about the history of nursing or engineering without researching any of
the literature produced by nurses or engineers? Yet in my reading of works by
those few historians recently writing directly on the archive, I have almost never
seen citations (with very rare and then very spotty exceptions) to any of the
thousands of articles, books, and published studies, let alone internal reports,
produced by archivists, in English alone, in the past three decades, including
no few such writings by archivists that from the inside both theorize the archive,
the archives, and their historical evolution.29
There is surely more to this silence, this invisibility, than mere oversight,
or a kindly trust by historians that archivists are going about their business in
a responsible way, or, conversely, peevish complaints from archivists that they
are not getting sufcient respect. Brien Brothman, a leading Canadian archival
thinker of the late twentieth century, has asserted that historians are collectively
if maybe subconsciouslyafraid to acknowledge, at least until very recently,
contested archives because of their own professional mythologies. Updating
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27
Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007), 21819 (emphasis added).
28
See, for example, Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 69, and passim. This stimulating volume contains but
one book by an archivist (co-authored with a historian) in its extensive bibliography and no references
(save to that same author) to any archivist in its index; no archivist is included among its sixteen
authors; and no consideration of the ideas of even the giants of archival literature is offered when
discussing the archive.
29
I am happy again to acknowledge some exceptions, as mentioned above in notes 22 and 26; see also
some authors in Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and
Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2006).
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Kaye Lambs insights, Brothman believes that this exclusion of actual archives
from historians consciousnessarchives as curatorial process, as institution, as
profession, as assumptions and beliefs, and as archival recordsis a peculiar
form of disciplinary repression or blindness. Symptomatic of this blindness is
the usual marginalization of discussion of archival sources as archivesnot as
the archiveby historians to introductions, prefaces, or postscripts in their
books, and the convention in academic history of consigning source references
to footnotes or endnotes, at the bottom, at the back, rather than inserted directly
into the text, as is done in almost every other social science discipline. Brothman
wonders if this blindness may reect an unconscious recognition by historians
that the distancing, the spacing, between archives and history is essential to
empowering the traditional discourses of both professions centered upon
objectivity. Without this distancing, he continues, the differentiation between
the archival object (the record or document, the artifact) and the historical
object (the book, the article, knowledge [of the past]) begins to break down;
archives and history begin to transgress each other, pollute each other,
threatening, if integrated too closely, to cancel out the purity of each others
intentions, each others object(ivity).30
This blindness by historians has been readily encouraged by archiv
ists, again until very recently. Many archivists are apparently satised being
societys footnotes rather than being openly integrated into its main texts for
remembering and forgetting. Doubtless some genuinely believe that upholding
objectivity and neutrality is their professional duty, even if much of what they
do suggests otherwise. Certainly in the traditional view of the archivists role
in society, best enunciated by Jenkinson in the 1920s, still espoused explicitly
by a few archivists, and absorbed by many more as a kind of unquestioned
professional ethos, archivists do not interpret, or mediate, or construct social
memory. Rather, they are professional preservers, the keepers, the handmaidens.
They manage or administer archives; they do not (co-)create them. Indeed,
a large number of the leading archival textbooks over the past century have
management, administration, methodology, or manual in their titles.
Such rhetoric suggests that archivists have been more comfortable managing
the records they receive, and honing appropriate methods, processes, and
procedures to do so, but rather less comfortable questioning blurred origins
of records; discerning structural-functional tensions within records-creating
cultures; challenging allegedly natural orders for classifying, arranging, or
describing records; or consciously creating new meanings for the records under
archival control. Such reluctance goes back to the origins of the profession.
30
Brien Brothman, The Limits of Limits: Derridean Deconstruction and the Archival Institution,
Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993): 215 (original emphasis).
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The modern archival profession, and the establishment of national

archives all across Europe and overseas, were alike called into existence by the
French Revolution, whose leaders in 1793 created the Archives Nationales in
Paris as a public institution and historical source, as an agent of the cultural,
social, and nationalist policy of the state rather than as an integral part of the
ongoing legal and transactional business of government. The public archives
of the nineteenth century existed primarily for history, not for administration.31
Modern archives in the Western world had their genesis, then, at the very heart
of the event that David Lowenthal ags as being most responsible for turning
the past into a foreign country, as something to be collected, guarded, and
venerated, as if on a pedestal, separated from the present, thus bearing the
pristine character that the new scientic historians required for their work.
Such historians, not incidentally, educated all the new professional archivists
in these very values.
As archives evolved during the nineteenth century, this sense of the pristine
quality of archival records was reinforced by contemporary Darwinian thinking.
The pioneer archival thinkers asserted that records arranged in archives were
an organic whole, a kind of natural selection left over from administrative
processes, a residue deposited, as it were, from the bureaucratic river at
the delta of archives. This residue the archivist then acquired and kept in
original order to reect (and thereby authenticate) the origin, the context or
provenance, of that organic survival. Jenkinson entitled a major portion of his
famous Manual the evolution of archives and refers to some of the original
stock of record classes continuing to throw out fresh branches, while others
die out. As did the Dutch authors of the rst-ever modern textbook on archival
methods, written in 1898, Jenkinson compared the archivistwhen building
the backbone of a skeleton for archival arrangementto a paleontologist.
In this naturalized Darwinian world, appraisal and selection by the archivist of
only a portion of the total record from the whole was viewed as anti-archival,
for the inevitable subjective values of the appraising archivist would do violence
to the allegedly organic character of the evolved archive. Appraisal wrenches
records from their original context and their original order of creation. Rather,
Jenkinson cautioned the archivist to approach records without prejudice or
afterthought, claiming that the archivist thereby becomes the most seless
devotee of Truth the modern world produces.32 As Lowenthal suggests, if
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31
Janice Panitch, Liberty, Equality, Posterity? Some Archival Lessons from the Case of the French
Revolution, American Archivist 59 (Winter 1996): 3047.
32
Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, rev. 2nd ed. (1922, 1937), 28, 1056, 101, and
passim; and cited in J. Conway Davies, Memoir of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, in Studies Presented to Sir Hilary
Jenkinson, C.B.E., LL.D., F.S.A. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). On the character and impact
of the famous Dutch Manual of 1898 on Jenkinson himself and through translation into many languages, see Cook, What Is Past Is Prologue, 2022; and Eric Ketelaar, Archival Theory and the Dutch
Manual, Archivaria 41 (Spring 1996): 3140.
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professional historical values in the nineteenth century assumed a past rmly

divorced from the present, any present-minded values of the archivist engaged
in appraisal must be suppressed, or at least denied, if the ideal of objective
guardianship were to prevail. Anything that elevatedeven acknowledgedthe
work as well beyond the mechanical treading of Jenkinsons ox or Brymners
stump remover became highly problematic. And so we get the oft-repeated
assertions of the archivists objectivity and neutrality: archivists work diligently,
but quietly, behind the scenes, vacuuming and cleaning, storing and retrieving,
but disturbing these natural orders and organic residues as little as possible.
In the parallel and interconnected evolution of the archival and historical
professions outlined above, therefore, there are serious misconceptions:
scholars using archives without questioning the heavy layers of intervention and
meaning coded into the records by archivists, long before any box is opened
in the reading room, and projecting that desired nonproblematic state for
the archive onto archivists and archives; and archivists, responding obligingly,
treating their archives without much sensitivity to the very large footprints
they themselves are continually leaving on the archival record and therefore
on the writing of history, or any great concern (since no one seemed inter
ested) that their many necessarily subjective interventions (and the methods
and ideas behind them) be well researched, documented, transparent, and
accountable, so that these could be interrogated and understood by researchers,
if the surviving archive were to be used with greater nuance. Both scholars
and archivists have had, until very recently, a vested interest in perceiving
(and promoting) the archives as a value-free site of document collection
and historical inquiry, rather than a site for negotiating power, memory, and
identity. While growing scholarly attention (including by historians) is nally
being paid to the processes of records creation and inscription, and to broader
issues of intentionality, representation, and memory, very little notice is still
given by nonarchivists to how the record is chosen and shaped, privileged or
marginalized, by the archivists many interventions. The ox treads on.
Surely every reader will by now be thinking that all this is a vast over
statement. Have not Canadian archivists inside the profession, as Kaye Lamb
implies above, over the past fty years become less passiveaccepting, for
example, appraisal as both necessary and desirable? Have they not, in two other
major initiatives, promoted, on the one hand, active partnerships with records
managers in order to implement better recordkeeping practices in modern
institutions and to grapple with computer-generated records, and, on the
other hand, borrowed from librarians to design standardized national systems
for describing archives and to preserve recorded digital objects across time?
Yet until very recently, such interventions, I would suggest, have been linked
either to closely following research trends among historians, in terms of Lambs
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appraisal methods, or on the other two fronts with records managers and
librarians, to advancing the archival agenda in technical and methodological
ways, rather than considering the theoretical and research-based knowledge
posed by these new challengesand with a focus that caused archivists thereby,
perhaps not intentionally, to drive a wedge between themselves and historians.
For appraisal, many archivists have concluded in recent years that trying
to mirror in selection criteria the latest subject trends in historiography, as
Lamb and others suggested in the mid-century years, is too narrow. While
this approach in its time was a welcome advance from Jenkinsons passive
curator receiving the residue passed on by administrators, it continues to
cast archivists too readily as handmaidens reecting historians wishes, rather
than those of a much wider range of actual and potential users. An alternate
approach to appraisal envisions archivists as active agents researching and
interpreting human and organizational functions and behaviors, amid the
complex contexts of records creation, judging the degree of signicance or
impact of these record-creating processes and citizens interaction with them,
and then selecting and constructing the archive accordingly to reect these
contexts, interactions, processes, and activities.33
Beyond appraisal, most major (and well-funded) archival research projects
have, over the past two decades, focused on creating and implementing
consistent descriptive standards and their display in a national network or on
rules and models for managing contemporary digital records. Yet there remains
a relative silence in archival writing (and in such mega-research projects) on
the actual substance of the research-based, archival, contextual knowledge that
is essential to put inside these empty standards and templates to make them
mean anything.34
This focus on the methodologies, the technologies, and the mechanics
of archival processes and of records preservation reveals an essential
proclivity to means rather than ends, to managing rather than mediating,
to remaining Jenkinsons white-coated scientic clinicians unsoiled by the
messy interpretation of the value of records that is always endemic to reallife practice. But in that daily practice in the real world of actual archives,
once these standards, databases, templates, and models are createdand let
no one misunderstand me, it is good that they be created and much praise
is due to those who have done this difcult workthe complex research-
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33
For a history of the values and methodologies over time that have animated the appraisal of archives,
see again Cook, What Is Past Is Prologue; and Cook, Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice.
34
The major exception is the growing articulation from inside the profession of new ideas and perspectives about the possibilities of the postmodern archive(s) as self-consciously constructed loci of power,
identity, and memory: see below note 48. Despite the impressive array of such writing in Canada and
elsewhere, it has not been funded or coordinated as major research projects or with formal institutional support, but rather evolved through many one-off pieces by individual archivists and archival
educators.
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based knowledge of the archivist needed to ll these empty shells will always,
by denition, be subjective and interpretive. And it will always be historical.
It will and should be other things toodrawing (as archival studies graduate
curricula do) on sociology, organizational theory, psychology, political science,
anthropology, geography, philosophy, cultural and media studies, and much
morebut archivists are, in the core substance of their work, researching to
contextualize over time (that is, historically) records creators, recording media
and processes, and the resultant records. By doing so, archivists create new
knowledge through historynot history as historians do from the records con
tent, but history as archivists do about the records context.
This focus on archival contextual knowledge amounts, in Canadian
archival educator Tom Nesmiths happy phrasing over twenty-ve years ago,
to a history of the record, before and after the record enters the archival
institution. It aims at transforming content-centered information into contextrich knowledge, and applying the results to all facets of archival work. Such
research by archivists amounts, in Hugh Taylors view, to a new form of social
historiography to make clear how and why records were created; this should
be the archival task, a task dealing less with individual documents and series
and more with the recognition of forms and patterns of knowledge which may
be the only way by which we will transcend the morass of information and data
into which we will otherwise fall.35
Archival research in this mode, by archivists, explores the history, evolving
functions, ever-changing structures, legal frameworks, devolved or regional
character, and organizational cultures of institutions that create records, or
similarly the biographical and psychological details of private individuals
creating personal records, from letters to diaries to photographs to websites. It
discerns the design, changes, and biases of records classication systems, from
records management le manuals to computer metadata. It tracks migrations
of records (usually only portions and fragments of the total record) from one
system to the next, often masked by renumbering and relabeling of le folders.
It assesses the possibilities (and limitations) of recording technologies and
recording media on the kind of information that may be recorded in particular
times and places. It studies patterns of communications in records in all media,
35
The original statement is in Tom Nesmith, Archives from the Bottom Up: Social History and Archival
Scholarship, Archivaria 14 (Summer 1982): 526, reprinted with corrections in Canadian Archival
Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance, ed. Tom Nesmith (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1993). An early
parallel analysis that demonstrated the value of this approach to actual archival work was Terry Cook,
From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives, Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984
1985): 2849. For the quotations, see Hugh A. Taylor, Transformation in the Archives: Technological
Adjustment or Paradigm Shift? Archivaria 25 (Winter 19871988): 24 (original emphasis); and Hugh
A. Taylor, Towards the New Archivist: The Integrated Professional, 1988, rst published in Cook and
Dodds, Imagining Archives, 154. From these early stirrings in the 1980s and early 1990s, the richness of
this approach has been considerably expanded in theory and strategy: for a flavor of such history of
the records by archivists primarily, see note 40 below.
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how records were shared within and across organizations, the delays of time
and space affecting such communication, and the impact of all this on the
decision making reected in the records. It looks at how records were used
(or not) for subsequent or later transactions, and thus the interrelationships
among records and their creators over time and across space. And of course,
it tracks changing ownerships or provenances of the records, including
destruction by their creators, subsequent inheritors of the record, or archivists,
and it studies all signicant interventions by the archives itself in the history of
the record for any and all archival functions. This research-based knowledge
by archivists into the context of the record serves collectively to understand
the prominence or fore-grounding of some kinds of records and their creators
and causes, and thus of certain kinds of human information and knowledge, in
the past, across time, within history, and equally the shielding or marginalizing
of other kinds of records, creators, recording media, causes, and knowledge.
Archivists themselves need this complex array of research-based knowledge in
order to perform well their daily work and decision making in the four core
archival functions of appraisal and acquisition, arrangement and description,
preservation and migration, and reference and public programming. The value
of such knowledge for historians and other users of the records surface content
should be self-evident, for it opens many new windows to seeing/reading and
understanding the surviving records anew.36
Again, the reader might likewise protest that historians have long known that
societal or collective memories have not been formed haphazardly throughout
history, or without controversy. As acknowledged above, historians in the past
decade especially have been studying very carefully the processes over time that
have determined what was inscribed and then considered by contemporaries as
worth remembering and, as important, what was to be forgotten, deliberately
or accidentally, in various cultures. With considerable sophistication, historians
now recognize the silences in the surviving archival record, and the need to
read against the grain to hear suppressed or marginalized voices. They are
questioning the nature of recordswho creates them, in support of which
exercises of power, and who uses them and destroys thembut the argument
here is that historians are not, in these recent questionings, considering the
impact of archivists or archival institutions or archival policies and concepts on
those same records.
For a mere avoring of such recent work, one should start with the
inuential French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, who back in 1969
probed the very archaeology of knowledge, demonstrating that the discursive
patterns in the archival document, or in an entire information classication
36
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On the research agenda for archivists, see Terry Cook, The Imperative of Challenging Absolutes in
Graduate Archival Education Programs: Issues for Educators and the Profession, American Archivist 63
(Fall/Winter 2000): 38091.
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system, reect the power structures of the records creator, and that a new
epistemology based on contextual social theory was needed to replace the
scientic positivism of past historians (and archivists). French historian Jacques
Le Goff was one of the rst to make archives explicitly a subject for historical
inquiry, suggesting that there had always been a politics of archival memory
where, ever since the ancient world, those in power decided who was allowed
to speak and who was forced into silence, both in public life and in archival
records. Indeed, he shows that archives had their institutional origins in the
ancient world as agents for legitimizing such power and for marginalizing those
without poweran insight anticipated years earlier by Harold Inniss work on
empires and their control of the means of communication. Medieval archives,
scholars such as Patrick Geary are discovering, were collectedand later often
weeded and reconstructed, even rewrittennot only to keep evidence of legal
transactions, as the positivist archival pioneers would have asserted, but also
explicitly to serve historical, sacral, personal, and symbolic purposes, but only
for those gures and events judged worthy of celebrating, or memorializing,
within the context of their time. First World War archives in Britainright
under Hilary Jenkinsons impartial noseare now revealed by historians to
have been subjected to signicant tampering and alteration in order, for
example, to make Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig appear less culpable for
the slaughter on the Western Front over which he had command and much
responsibility. The colonial records of the Belgian governments rule in the
Congo under King Leopolds personal efdom were deliberately burned to
hide evidence of his agents imperial savagery. European imperial powers more
generally used records, from maps to censuses to royal commission reports, to
legitimize and reinforce their own power by controlling the denition, naming,
and categorizing of their subjects into marginal subaltern spaces.37
37
Foucaults key works for archivists are The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New
York: Vantage Books/Random House, 1970, originally in French in 1966) and The Archaeology of
Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, originally in French in 1969). For Harold A. Innis, see
The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951) and Empire and Communications
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950). For the other examples cited here, see Jacques Le Goff,
History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xvixvii, 5960, and passim; Patrick
J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 8687, 177, and esp. chap. 3: Archival Memory and the Destruction
of the Past and passim; Denis Winter, Haigs Command: A Reassessment (Harmondsworth U.K.: Penguin,
1991), especially the section: Falsifying the Record; and Adam Hochschild, King Leopolds Ghost: A
Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1998). On the imperial/
colonial archive, see the work by Anderson, Richards, and Stoler cited in note 8 above, and that of
Antoinette Burton and Betty Joseph in note 38 below, as well as Jeannette Allis Bastian, Owning Memory:
How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (Portsmouth, N.H.: Greenwood, 2003),
among a vast and growing array of possible titles to cite.
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All these elds of investigation into the archivethe collective record

are extraordinarily rich, and expanding impressively, almost exponentially, in
quality and quantity. In this approach, the archive is seen as reecting those
institutions that had the power (and resources) to articulate through written
records and visual images their view of the world, and that, not surprisingly,
used these recording tools in turn to order, control, name, map, depict,
count, and classify that world to reect their own assumptions and values and
reinforce their own power, status, and control. Of course they also had the
power and motivation (and resources) to preserve those records (no mean feat
over centuries) that best served as evidence of the seeming naturalness of their
own hegemony.
Inuenced by such disciplines as literature, philosophy, and media,
cultural, and womens studies, historians have also been looking anew at the
personal archive, beyond the ofcial government or institutional recordkeeping world. Feminist scholarship especially has read such an archive against
the grain of its surface content to discern fresh information, for various times
and places, about the degree and type of voice allowed to women, and their own
agency in negotiating for space within the dominant hierarchies and discourse
of power. Here the archive is still symbolic, metaphoric, and discursive rather
than institutional, cultural, and curatorial; it is nding the voice of the antiarchive in the shadows and silences of the ofcial institutional archives.38And
on the subject of the institutional archives, the pioneering American feminist
historian Gerda Lerner has traced how, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth
century, there has been a systemic exclusion of women from societys memory
tools, including its archives. History itself as a profession has similarly been
criticized for its patriarchal assumptions, practices, and conclusions, although
curiously archives and archivists have largely escaped this condemnation, at
least from historians, and no historian has considered that the very arrangement
(and subsequent description, and re-presentation to researchers) of archival
38
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An acclaimed pioneering example is the work by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, especially Hearing

Womens Voices: A Feminist Reconstruction of History, and The Female World of Love and Ritual:
Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America, both appearing in her Disorderly Conduct:
Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Building on that tradition, see Antoinette Burtons innovative Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History
in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). A similarly nuanced study of the marginalized voices in ofcial records, as well as in other writing, is Betty Joseph, Reading the East India
Company 17201840: Colonial Currencies in Gender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Not
only imperial or postcolonial studies follow this gender-based analysis; see Susan Close, Framing Identity:
Social Practices of Photography in Canada (18801920) (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2007); Shawn Michelle
Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1999); Carol J. Williams, Framing the West: Race, Gender, and the Photographic Frontier in the Pacic
Northwest (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and, in an archivist-historian collaboration,
Sharon Anne Cook, Lorna McLean, and Kate ORourke, eds., Framing Our Past: Canadian Womens
History in the Twentieth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001).
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records in multiple levels of descending orders legitimizes a hierarchical and

patriarchal order as natural.39
These and many similar works suggest possible openings for a history of
archives (plural) and a history of archival records, as contrasted to the history
of the archive, and one done with a perspective from inside institutional
archives. How, for example, have archivists in many times and places reected
these changing power struggles over records as they, as archivists, dened their
profession, institutions, policies, and procedures, and of course as they made
their appraisal and acquisition decisions in building actual collections of who
or what was considered worth remembering? How have radical changes in the
nature and media of records, the culture of record-creating organizations, the
psychologies behind personal record making, the design of recordkeeping
systems, and the classication, uses, and communication patterns of records
all before they arrive at the archivesaffected archival theory and archival
practice? Going beyond the immediate world of records and archives, how have
changes over time in the cultural, legal, technological, educational, social, and
philosophical trends in society inuenced the archives of those societiesand
the assumption, concepts, strategies, and practices of archivists within these
archives? From such questions as many historians are raising about the archive,
archivists have very much to learn.
To answer these and similar questions, archivists need an intellectual history
of their own profession, from the inside out and the outside in: a partnership,
respectively and ideally, of archivists and historians, for they both have much to
teach each other.40 Canada needs a History of the Archive(s) research project
parallel to the successful History of the Book series. Archivists and historians
both need to understand better the very ideas and assumptions about archives
that have shaped their ethos, their concepts, their institutions, their collec
tions, and their practices, if in future archivists want their institutions to reect
more accurately and accountably all components of the complex societies they
serve, if they want their usersincluding historiansto approach (and be able
39
See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Smith, The Gender of History. Certainly womens historians
from Mary Beard to Lerner herself have seen the paucity of womens sources in most archives up to
the 1970s. While many collections of womens records from individuals, clubs, and associations have
been acquired since, the nature of archives themselves as institutions, created and situated within
patriarchy for shoring up the status and power of their sponsors, has rarely been addressed.
40
Archivists are nally turning to a scholarly analysis of the history of archivesas records, institutions,
ideas, and social activity. The launching of the series of International Conferences on the History of
Records and Archives(ICHORA), spearheaded by Canadian archival educator Barbara Craig, has been
a great success, with the best papers from ichora-1 hosted by her in Toronto in 2003, published in
Archivaria 60, and from ichora-2, held in Amsterdam in 2005, appearing in Archival Science 6, nos.
34, followed by ichora-3 in Boston in 2007 and ichora-4 in Perth (Australia) in 2008, publication
pending in both cases, with ichora-5 set for London in 2010. More than a hundred papers delivered
at these conferences, as well as other articles and collections, demonstrate convincingly, in many times,
places, and cultures, that archives (plural) are historically contingent, reecting the power and authority, biases and prejudices, technologies and ideologies of their contemporary societies.
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to interrogate) archival collections with greater subtlety and understanding, if

archivists themselves wish through such self-analysis to hone their own thinking
and improve their praxis. Such a history of archival ideas requires listening
to the archival discourse of different times and places, to hear again, and
to discover within the context of their time, and our own, the assumptions,
ideas, and concepts that underpin archival work. This collective discourse
is the metatext that animates archival professional practice, often in barely
recognized ways inside and certainly outside the archival profession. Analyzing
this text over time and space properly forms the focus of an intellectual history
of archives. Its articulation will break the harmful silence between historians
and archivists.
Let me outline in very broad strokes some possible contexts for that
history and the resulting archival practice, from the changing archival ethos in
Canada, and internationally.41 Just as many of the early professional historians
focused on the political, legal, constitutional, and economic character of
the nation state, so too were the rst articulations of professional archival
principles strongly biased in favor of the state. Almost all the classic tomes
about archival methodology were written by senior staff members of national
archives in Europe. Not surprisingly, most focused on government, public,
or corporate records and their orderly transfer to archival repositories to
preserve their original order and classication; and most relegated private
and personal archives to the purview of libraries and librarians. Indeed, to
this day, national archives in Europe generally look after only the ofcial
records of their sponsoring governments; national or regional or university
libraries (or state historical societies, regional and local archives, or special
documentation institutes) take custody of personal manuscripts. That pattern
prevails in most other English-speaking countries, including England, Ireland,
the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, although not in
Canada or Scotland with their total archives approaches. Why are personal
archives (and their archivists) not part of most countries national archives?
Why are those who look after government records in those archives called
archivists and those who look after personal records in libraries usually labeled
manuscript curators or special librarians or documentalists, with a whole range
of assumptions (often negative) implied by these terms? Why are archivists of
textual records called archivists, but those of maps, photographs, paintings,
or lm are called media archivists, as if text on paper were not a medium?
Why until very recently was oral memory not considered an archival medium
41
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For an analysis of these broad trends among the traditional and pioneering generations, see Laura
Millar, Discharging Our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada,
Archivaria 46 (Fall 1998): 10346; James M. OToole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and
Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006); and again Cook, What Is Past Is
Prologue.
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at all? Such fundamental divisions within the internal organization of archival

memory between public and private, text and images, written and oral, are alone
stark evidence that the archival endeavor, as formulated, practiced, and codied
by the archival pioneers, was hardly as value free as they asserted. Indeed, the
prospect of fruitful fertilization across these various divides is reason enough to
understand better the historical origins of these articial barriers.
The pioneering archival theorists all worked in an era of relative document
scarcity. Their professional experience and thus their soon-codied concepts
about archives came from dealing with limited numbers of medieval or early
modern documents susceptible to careful diplomatic analysis of each page, or
with records found in well-organized, highly centralized, departmental registry
systems of the emerging nineteenth-century modern nation state. Functions
of government in such nineteenth-century administrations were limited,
focused, and stable within classic mono-hierarchical structures. As a result, the
archival pioneers ignored the appraisal function entirely. There simply was no
need for selection, as every surviving scrap of recorded information from the
Middle Ages or early modern Europe was preserved. Rather, the priority was on
rescuing old records from towers, dungeons, and basements, and protecting
them carefully in context within the new national archives. More modern
records, as noted, came to archives from government departments as natural
residues left over from administrative processes within highly centralized and
small-scale records or registry ofces. This residue approach favored retaining
as archives the policy or legal or senior-level documents most important to the
government ofcials who made the keep-destroy decisions, rather than more
transient case les where citizens interacted with the state at the bottom of
the classic hierarchical pyramid of organizational structure. This process of
winnowing the wheat from the chaff, according to administrative and political
needs and priorities, was typically characterized by a very long separation in
time between the currently active (and then long-dormant) records still under
government administrative control and those that were centuries old and held
by the archives. The records themselves were viewed as reections of the hier
archical structures (and the activities therein) that caused them to be created.
They were to be preserved impartially, therefore, as evidence of the activities of
the bureaucratic ofce that created them.
Obviously, this approach was anything but the impartial or objective
or natural stance claimed for it by the archival pioneers, for it sanctioned
the already strong predilection of archives and archivists, as institutions
and employees of the nation-state, to support mainstream culture and to
showcase its most powerful records creators. Such approaches produced
archival collections that privilege the ofcial narratives of the state over the
documented stories of individuals and groups in society, or even of citizens
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interaction with the state. Until the 1950s, the emphasis was, moreover, on
the records of the legal, constitutional, scal, defense, and foreign policy
dimensions of the nation state, and much less on its social, natural resource,
environmental, or cultural programs. Until well into the 1970s and beyond,
the traditional approach privileged policy records over operational records, let
alone individual transactional-level case les. This statist approach to dening
archives evidently also marginalizes purely personal papers, for these were
placed, as noted, outside the purview of European and most English-speaking
national archives entirely, with some happy exceptions, including Canada.
The archival rules for determining the evidence qualities and authenticity of
records, and thus their value as reliable research sources, also reected the
state archives perspectives on (and thus naturalized assumptions about) wellorganized, centrally controlled, and ofcially sanctioned government records.
This process thus favored textual documents in such registries, from which
such rules were rst derived, at the expense of other media, especially audiovisual media and oral culture, for experiencing and recording the present, and
determining therefore the best archives to preserve to view the past.42
The positivist and scientic values permeating such thinking also
inhibited archivists then, and since, from developing and documenting
multiple ways of seeing and knowing and describing their records; archivists
are similarly disinclined to acknowledge and display multiple and confused
provenances, or migrations and mergings of records over time and of their
creators and their activities. Rather, an original order (a classic and cardinal
archival principle) was sought and (re)imposed in archival arrangement, and
then perpetuated and enshrined in the descriptive nding aids presented to
researchers, rather than allowing several orders or even disorders to exist among
records in archives.443 An even greater absence of order or system is apparent in
the recordkeeping habits of private individuals, small groups, and associations,
but archivists habitually clean up such chaos, rearranging records by name,
subject, or date. Records or series of records, following archival descriptive
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42
Joan M. Schwartz, Coming to Terms with Photographs: Descriptive Standards, Linguistic Othering,
and the Margins of Archivy, Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002): 14271; Peter Horsman, The Last Dance of the
Phoenix, or the De-discovery of the Archival Fonds, Archivaria 54 (Fall 2002): 123.
43
The rst major statement fundamentally challenging these accepted orders was Brien Brothman,
Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice, Archivaria 32(Summer 1991):
78100. See also the critique by Terry Cook, The Concept of the Archival Fonds in the Post-Custodial
Era: Theory, Problems and Solutions, Archivaria 35 (Spring 1993): 2437; and Wendy M. Duff and
Verne Harris, Stories and Names: Archival Description as Narrating Records and Constructing
Meanings, Archival Science 2, nos. 34 (2002): 26385. Other archivists already cited such as Peter
Horsman, Tom Nesmith, Joan Schwartz, and Hugh Taylor have also questioned these assumptions in
terms of traditional recording media, let alone their electronic or digital counterparts. On the impact
of electronic or digital recording media on traditional archival orders, see the work of David Bearman
most prominently, in note 47 below.
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rules and standards, are arranged and described in very detailed general-tospecic hierarchies to reect, allegedly, their original placement in the creating
agencys administrative hierarchy; each record series is placed by archivists in
one such administrative hierarchical fonds, and (by current descriptive stan
dards) in one fonds only. Archivists thereby have traditionally masked much
of the messiness of records (and their creating entities) from researchers,
presenting instead a well-organized, rationalized, monolithic view of a record
collection (or fonds) that very often never existed that way in operational reality
with its original creator or creators. The archive is offered (and promoted) as
trustworthy evidence of actions, accurate mirrors of acts and facts, frozen in time,
in reliable original orders, unaltered contexts, xed descriptive groups, kept
impartially by archivists, so that the Truth, as Jenkinson put it, and traditional
positivist historians hoped, could be found in such preserved, pristine, virginal
records. Yet, ironically, as Dutch archivist Eric Ketelaar has shrewdly observed,
this guardianship mentalite of archivists, stressing custody and control, has often
made archival reference rooms and services more prisonlike than welcoming,444
and archival public programming until very recently passive and unimaginative,
unsuited to the needs and possibilities of an online, information-hungry, and
interactive age. In short, what historians would nd, if they were to examine the
footprints left by archivists by such a historical analysis of the archiving function
in society, is a whole series of heavily mediated lters that govern how records
rst are chosen to come to archives, and then are re-presented to researchers
by archivists in various kinds of physical orders and containers and in varying
intellectual nding aids and research guides. The neutral, impartial archive of
classic archival theory, is, in reality, a place of order, control, hierarchy, reect
ing the power of the state, or other sponsoring institution(a business, university,
church, and so on), that called it into existence and continues to pay the bills.
But what happens if the very societal basis for this traditional archival
mindset is now no longer relevant, or just plain wrong? What if, as has happened
increasingly over the past century, function and structure no longer coincide
in a single neat box on the classic organizational chart, but now thrive in evershifting structures that are multifunctional, even virtual, where work tasks and
structural lines blur continually, yet archivists insist on attaching records to one
single structuralist entity in the descriptive nding aids that researchers use
as their principal entree to records in archives? What happens, as recent case
studies show, if the ofcial centralized registry of records never actually operated
in that classic way, stymied even in Jenkinsons day, within the British Treasury at
the heart of his own government, by informal conventions, localized practices,
44
Eric Ketelaar, Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection, Archival Science 2,
nos. 34 (2002): 22138.
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social expectations, and cultural norms?45 What happens when organizational

cultures and workplace discourses are now transformed from vertical to
horizontal, from controlling to collaborative, from stovepipes to networks, from
executive at to internal consensus, with records created in these new milieus
following these new conventions, and yet archivists still think hierarchically,
and structure their archives and nding aids accordingly, increasingly out of
contact with reality? What happens when records are managed on desktops
by thousands of end-users in these new uid organizations and not in some
centralized, ordered, and controlled manner, if ever they were that?46 What
happens when the record-creating universe moves from a paradigm of scarcity
and survival of medieval manuscripts to an avalanche of paper: It was estimated
that each government records archivist in the 1990s at the National Archives of
Canada appraisedjust in terms of paper records aloneat a rate equivalent
to thirteen books every second to choose the 1 or 2 percent that would survive
as the collective archive! What happens when there are multiple orders and
places and sites of records creation and use, or indeed disorders, rather than
one ordered, set, xed place for each record in this cascading avalanche of
recorded information? What happens when the record itself is now no longer
primarily xed text on paper, but virtual and digital, with images and texts and
sounds and voices combined, often interactively, in volumes ten or a hundred
times that of the paper avalanche?47 What, then, happens to archives? What,
then, is the archive?
The response by archivists to this changing and challenging landscape has
been at least twofoldand (perhaps not surprising, given the above historical
evolution of the profession) very contested within recent archival discourse and
published literature, and in actual practice. No few archivists still adhere to large
portions of the traditional professional assumptions, thus rendering it difcult
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45
Barbara L. Craig, Rethinking Formal Knowledge and Its Practices in the Organization: The British
Treasurys Registry between 1900 and 1950, Archival Science 2, nos. 12 (2002): 11136, as well as a
more contemporary example by Ciaran B. Trace, What Is Recorded Is Never Simply What Happened:
Record-Keeping in Modern Organizational Culture, in Archival Science 2, nos. 12 (2002): 13759.
46
Veteran electronic records archivist John McDonald has termed this a wild frontier without order,
where everything goes; see his Managing Records in the Modern Ofce: Taming the Wild Frontier,
Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995): 7079. Despite much effort by McDonald and others (see note 47), not
much taming is yet evident in most workplaces that create digital records or in archives that (allegedly)
preserve them.
47
While scores of archivists have addressed the challenges of born-digital records, the most inuential
has been David Bearman, through many articles and a ground-breaking research project at the
University of Pittsburgh (in conjunction with Richard Cox). Many key essays are collected in his
Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and
Museum Informatics, 1994). On his fundamental challenge to conventional archival approaches, see
Terry Cook, The Impact of David Bearman on Modern Archival Thinking: An Essay of Personal
Reection and Critique, Archives and Museum Informatics 11 (1997): 1537. Building on the Pittsburgh
work, but using different conceptual foundations, was a Canadian project centered at the University
of British Columbia; its ndings are presented in Luciana Duranti, Terry Eastwood, and Heather
MacNeil, Preservation of the Integrity of Electronic Records (Dordrecht, Ger.: Kluwer, 2002).
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for them to cope with these new record-creating realities in a digital world, all
while they impose increasingly irrelevant orders and rules around the records
they acquire and present to researchers. More optimistically, another group
of archivists is calling for a complete reinvention of archives to acknowledge
that these are contingent places of power and agency that need new concepts
and models to transform themfrom modernist to postmodernist, from
passive custodial to active interventionist, from hierarchical and exclusionary
to networked and inclusive, from inward-looking and secretive to openly
transparent and interactive, from dealing at the micro level with impossible vol
umes of individual documents to making archival decisions at the macro level
of the records context and functionality, thus moving the focus for archival
activities from records as artifactual products to the complex processes of
record making.48
What might such a transformed archival landscape look like? That story
would take many more pages than are available, but here are some minimum
expectations. Appraisal would be sensitive to the citizens, not just the state, to the
marginalized and unsuccessful as much as the accepted and successful, so that
archival holdings would become more inclusive and democratic. Relationships
with records creators would be repositioned up front to inuence record
inscription at the time of creation rather than passively accepting long after
the fact the residues allowed by the powerful or those determined by transient
research trends or technological imperatives. The focus in all archival activities
would be on documenting function, activity, and ideas, rather than primarily
reecting the structures, ofces, and persons of origin. Description would be
opened up to presenting multiple origins and orders for situating records
rather than allowing only one way, would include extended essays on the deeper
contextual elements enveloping the complex creation, uses, and relationships
of records over their entire and continuing history, including after their
entry to the archives. In the process of reference services, archivists would be
openly receptive to researchers insights, leading to an interactive annotation
of record descriptions by researchers (and donors), as well as nurturing new
48
For an overview summary, see the two-part article by Terry Cook, Archival Science and Postmodernism:
New Formulations for Old Concepts, Archival Science 1 (2000); and Fashionable Nonsense or
Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the Practice of Archives, Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001):
1435. For historical, demographic, and archival reasons behind Canadas distinctive international
leadership in rst positing the postmodern archives, from the inside, by archivists, see Terry Cook,
Archival Principles and Cultural Diversity: Contradiction, Convergence, or Paradigm Shift? A
Canadian Perspective, Comma: International Journal on Archives, International Council on Archives
(forthcoming, 2009). A very long footnote (2021 n14) found in Fashionable Nonsense lists the most
important works by such key Canadian postmodernist archivists as Brien Brothman, Richard Brown,
Joan M. Schwartz, Tom Nesmith, Bernadine Dodge, Theresa Rowattt, and Lilly Koltun, joined by such
inuential international archivists as the Netherlands Eric Ketelaar, Australias Sue McKemmish, and
especially South Africas Verne Harris. Since these pioneering studies, there has been an explosion of
such writing in archival journals and books of collected essays that encourage archivists to investigate
their rolenow and historicallyin the construction of social memory (for the historical dimension
alone, see note 40 above).
629
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m e r i c a n
r c h i v i s t
communities and networks of users: Web 2.0 and the wiki mentalit meet
archives. Image and sound would be privileged equally with texts and words;
feeling and emotion equally with order and logic; conversation equally with
control. The visceral materiality of records in all media would be respected for
the information that only physicality reveals. A deeper appreciation everywhere
would be embraced that the records themselves would have detailed, contex
tualized, and interrelated histories, ever-evolving, opening up, rather than
closed down in xed frameworks when they cross the archival threshold. The
archivist, nally, would celebrate her or his subjective, mediative role, openly
and accountably, as an agent less for buttressing institutional power than for
advancing archives for broader social purposes. The archivist is accepted as the
conscious co-creator rather than the neutered caretaker of the archive. The ox
is no more.
This is no mere pipe dream, but part of a growing professional agenda
for archivists. Similar to the years following the French Revolution, there has
been in the past thirty years another marked historical change in articulating
the very reason why archival institutions existor at least public and publicly
funded archives. The justication for archives has shifted from being grounded
in concepts of the nation-state and its scholarly elites (primarily historians)
to broader socio-cultural justications grounded in public policies of
accountability, freedom of information, and wider public/citizen use, of archives
for protection of rights, heritage education at all levels, and the enjoyment of
personal and community connections with the past. In their collections and
services, archives have started to reect a more inclusive view of society and
of their clientele. American archival writer Gerald Ham was one of the rst
to set the professional goal of documenting the broad spectrum of human
experience rather than merely mirroring government hierarchies or research
trends.49 German archivist Hans Booms advocated that archivists should seek to
reect in their appraisal decisions comprehensive patterns of public opinion
rather than the needs or perspectives of state administrators; they should be
of, for, and by the people, in Eric Ketelaars adaptive phrasing.50 In Canada,
reecting these trends, the concept of macro-appraisal was developed rst at
the National Archives of Canada (and increasingly imitated internationally)
to document the citizen-state interaction at the heart of two-way governance
within society, rather than merely the policies and activities of government.51
630
49
F. Gerald Ham, The Archival Edge, in A Modern Archives Reader, ed. Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy
Walch (1975; Washington: National Archives and Records Service, 1984), 32829.
50
Booms, Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage; Eric Ketelaar, Archives of the
People, by the People, for the People, South Africa Archives Journal 34 (1992): 516.
51
The best introduction is the long summary article by Cook, Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice,
which contains many footnote references to a signicant number of supporting published essays,
including related theoretical analysis and real-world case studies.
T
A
h e
r c h i v e
r c h i v i s t s
( sT) h eI
a n d
t h e
ti sr ty
h i v a l
i s t o r i a n s
a n d s c a p e
Simply stated, it is no longer acceptable to limit the denition of societys

memory in archives solely to the documentary residue left over (or chosen)
by powerful record creators, whether Richard Nixon or Oliver North, Soviet
commissars or apartheid state police, Canadian military ofcers in Somalia
or Queensland politicians in the Heiner Affairto say nothing of the Enron
shredding mentalit in the private sector. Public and historical accountability
demands more now of archives, and more of archivists.52
In this gradual transformation of the archivist from passive keeper
guarding the past to active mediator self-consciously shaping societys collective
memory, the archive(s) itself is changed from an unquestioned storehouse of a
history waiting to be found to itself becoming a contested site for identity and
memory formation. The archives is thus transformed from source to subject.
The implications of this change for historians, for historical research, and
for historical source criticism remain largely unexplored, let alone what the
archivist-historian relationship might be in this new professional context.
If the ideas, concepts, strategies, and practices of archivists inside archives
were to be studied broadly by those historians now increasingly writing about
the archive and societal memoryand at least considered by all historians for
the particular groups and media and creators of records they are researching
in an archives, it would become readily apparent that archivists inevitably inject
their own values into every archival function, and that they shape the resulting
record that researchers use (or cannot use). Thus, the history of archives, of
which this essay has offered but a foretaste, may enrich the use of archives
by historians. Equally, archivists need to examine much more consciously,
and historically, their many choices (and the assumptions behind them) in
the archives-creating and memory-formation process, and they need to leave
transparent evidence of their own activity so they may be held accountable for
their choices to posterity. They need to reconsider too the relative abandoning
of their once-close relationship with historians, for in history applied to and
within the archives, continually, by archivists, to the archive, lies much promise
of better archival praxis. That they may do so without at all devaluing their new
alliances with records managers, librarians, or public policy makers, or their
new and wide range of other users of archives, should be obvious.
If archivists so embrace their roles in more self-conscious archives as
historians of the record in its multiple and complex origins, orderings, and
representations, as specialists of archival contextual knowledge through time
rather than generalists of process and procedure, historians (and all others
52
See the numerous arguments and case studies in Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African
Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007); Richard Cox and David Wallace, eds.,
Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, Conn.: Quorum
Books, 2002); and Margaret Procter, Michael G. Cook, and Caroline Williams, eds., Political Pressure and
the Archival Record (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).
631
h e
m e r i c a n
r c h i v i s t
users) will be afforded richer possibilities for exploring the past through
more deeply contextualized archives. In this milieu, historians may see the
value of studying archives through internal archival discourse rather than
external perceptions, and doing so in partnership with like-minded archivists.53
Historians cannot hope to study the history of archives without learning from
the professionals who create and maintain them; such a partnership should
transcend lobbying together for better funding and access to archives to an
area of mutual intellectual interest, viz. the history of archives, archivists, and
archival practices.54
As historians and archivists alike appreciate the signicance of postmodern
theory for their work, they may be enticed, in the words of historian Adele
Perry, to think critically and hard about the character of our sources and
what we propose to do with and say about them . . . to confront both the
limitations and possibilities of our source base in a careful and systematic way.
Australian archivist Michael Piggott observes that historians and archivists are
the custodians of memorythe retrievers and preservers of the stories. . . .
Because of this, we both are players in political drama and politicized history,
especially in times when great national debates appeal to the past, real and
imagined.55 If this deeper interrogation of sources were to occur on both sides
of the reference desk, then archives may no longer be such a foreign country.
632
53
For but two recent examples of the value of this approach, see Deidre Simmons (archivist), Keepers of
the Record: The History of the Hudsons Bay Company Archives (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens
University Press, 2007); and Betsey Baldwin (historian), Stepping Off the Paper Trail? Rethinking the
Mainframe Era at the Public Archives of Canada (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 2006).
54
Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan, Introduction, to their edited thematic issue, Towards a Cultural
History of Archives, Archival Science 7, no. 4 (December 2007): 289.
55
Adele Perry, The Historian and the Theorist Revisited, Histoire sociale/Social History 33, no. 65 (May
2000): 14849; Michael Piggott, Archivists and Historians; Archives and History (review article),
Archives and Manuscripts 35 (May 2007): 91. For a suggestive analysis of mutual challenges facing historians and archivists in the postmodern world, see Canadian archivist Bernadine Dodges Re-imag(in)
ing the Past, Rethinking History 10, no. 3 (September 2006): 34567.

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T

The Archive(s) Is a Foreign

he archivist-historian relationship is critically important to enabling

Association, as long-time editors of its journal and Historical Booklet series, as

Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, xvixvii, and passim.

in part through the enormous public interest in collecting natural specimens

mindset, when designating the work he did arranging archival records as

Report on Canadian Archives, 1889, cited in Nesmith, Seeing Archives, 28.

to be an invisible caretaker, a docile handmaiden, the harem-keeper of the

Such appraisal, and especially the concomitant destruction of all other

and non-directive wayevidently without interpretation.27 Even those historical

The modern archival profession, and the establishment of national

professional historical values in the nineteenth century assumed a past rmly

All these elds of investigation into the archivethe collective record

An acclaimed pioneering example is the work by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, especially Hearing

records in multiple levels of descending orders legitimizes a hierarchical and

to interrogate) archival collections with greater subtlety and understanding, if

at all? Such fundamental divisions within the internal organization of archival

social expectations, and cultural norms?45 What happens when organizational

Simply stated, it is no longer acceptable to limit the denition of societys

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