Tales from the vaults: personal encounters with archives and records (original) (raw)
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History Workshop Journal, 2007
The years around 1800 have often been regarded as being a fundamental epoch in European historiography, marking the point when history began to emerge as a modern professional discipline. In particular, the increasing accessibility of archives to historians has been regarded as allowing a more scientific historical methodology to develop. Yet archives have never been fully rational institutions or uncomplicated sites of knowledge, and in order to understand how they influenced historical writing it is necessary to study the practices of historians and other users, as well as the custodians and owners of archives. The articles in this themed issue all discuss the practices carried out by historians, researchers, and archivists in archives and libraries. In doing so, they reveal that there was a considerable continuity of practices that transcend the supposed divide of 1800.
Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory
Archival Science, 2002
This article serves as the general introduction by the guest editors to the first of two thematic issues of Archival Science that will explore the theme, "archives, records, and power." Archives as institutions and records as documents are generally seen by academic and other users, and by society generally, as passive resources to be .exploited for various historical and cultural purposes. Historians since the mid-nineteenth century, in pursuing the new scientific history, needed an archive that was a neutral repositories of facts. Until very recently, archivists obliged by extolling their own professional myth of impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity. Yet archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their position in society. Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. And archivists are an integral part of this story-telling. In the design of record-keeping systems, in the appraisal and selection of a tiny fragment of all possible records to enter the archive, in approaches to subsequent and ever-changing description and preservation of the archive, and in its patterns of communication and use, archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the archive. This represents enormous power over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going. Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old stuff', but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed. The power of archives, records, and archivists should no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability.
Narrating the Archive? Family Collections, the Archive, and the Historian
Shofar, 2019
This article seeks to open a discursive space in which to reflect on issues of Holocaust historiography arising from emerging research on personal archives collected by 'ordinary' people in relation to the Holocaust. The explorations, intended as a discussion piece, are anchored in a specific context, namely that of the Dorrith Sim Collection (DMSC) which is held in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) in Glasgow. This collection offers a focus to concretize the historiographical discussion in a largely un-researched collection, while enabling consideration of a range of related collections and publications. The article investigates the historiographical practices of those involved in the collection, preservation, presentation, and publication processes, and considers the inherent ethical choices: choices that highlight the agency of the family, the archivist and the scholar. Ethical choices, here, the investment of specific meanings and claims to significance, are amplified in this context because of their connection to genocide. I suggest that a 'transparent historiography' which accounts for the research process within the published narrative could address the challenges arising from the necessity to be selective about what to collect, preserve, and, write about, and how to do so. I borrow from other fields of research and professional practice to highlight possible avenues along which to advance historiographical discussion. The history of the archive is the recognition of loss. For archives to collect the past, the past has to come to mind as something imperiled and distinctive. 1 You should work on the Dorrith Sim Collection, says my friend and colleague Mia Spiro. We are standing in front of the shelves holding more than twenty archive boxes in the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre (SJAC) in Glasgow. It is autumn 2015 and our joint project on Jewish migration to Scotland in partnership with the SJAC has just begun. The opening phase of our work is a mapping exercise of the SJAC's collections in relation to a broad set of research areas, and making decisions on which aspects of the archive we will focus. Religion, the arts,
Articles Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE
https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/issue/view/429, 2001
ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical , and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. The subject of archives is, on the face of it, dry and dusty, but nevertheless fascinating for all sorts of reasons to many millions of people across the world. Moreover, in its formal, organizational, and utilitarian guise as "Arch-ives," it is increasingly emerging from the "basement to the boardroom" in governments and organizations and becoming a cultural phenomenon at the same *