Shaping Digital Recordkeeping Competence

This is the script of a talk delivered at the Archives and Records Association (ARA) Conference 2019 in Leeds.

We are about to have that conversation – you know the one where we bemoan our helplessness in the face of changing technology and agree that someone (ideally someone else) really ought to do something about it. Now I don’t know about you, but I am completely bored with that conversation and I am not prepared to have it again. So, before we start, we are going to have some ground rules and I ask that everyone seeks to abide by them, at least for the next 90 minutes.

Borrowing from a recent ARA commissioned report on another conversation we keep having (that around diversity), there will be none of the following in this session:

• No hand-wringing. In this session we will not reinforce a narrative of hopelessness, one that presents our history as one of losing ground and failure in respect of technology. This narrative is in many respects false. It is insulting to the many pioneering and innovative members of our profession who have come before us and it disempowers us in the present. This is not a crisis and even if it were it would not be one we are unequal to.
• No hand-washing. I am not interested in, nor do I wish to hear about what you think somebody else should be doing about this. What I do want to hear about (and I will be about all week if you want to come and talk to me) is what every single one of us (either individually or in conjunction with others) is doing about this, however big, however small and I know that every single one of you is doing something because I know what a dedicated and passionate profession we are.

Ground rules established, let us now work together to try to formulate an answer to the following questions;

• What do we mean by digital recordkeeping competence?
• And how do we build that competence across the profession?

These are the questions I would ask you to focus on as you listen to the next three papers. And my fellow panellists and I look forward to hearing your answers to them at the end.

As we all know ARA’s Competency Framework consists of 39 separate competencies, and of those 39 only one makes ‘digital’ explicit. That competency is within the process function of preserving archives and records in all media and formats and is defined as Digital curation: preserving born-digital and digitised records and archives. Not the most extensive definition of this competency then, and certainly of limited use to those of us interested in knowing what it is we need to know in order to develop it in ourselves or in others.

If you did want to look for a bit more detail than this, two other frameworks have been developed in the form of the DigCCurr Matrix of Digital Curation Knowledge and Competencies, which was created in a US context in around 2009/10 and the DigCurV Curriculum Framework which was created as part of an EU funded research project in 2013. The DigCurV framework has 4 domains, 14 sub-domains and 110 separate skills identifiers ranging from undertaking strategic planning to evaluating and treating employees fairly to managing and fostering stakeholder relationships to conducting user needs analysis to executing analysis of and forensic procedures in digital curation. As you can see many of the identified skills are not digital skills at all, but more so-called soft skills, the sorts of competencies also to found among the other non-digital 38 competencies in the ARA framework.

I still remember that a number of years ago, I sat in the audience at Conference to hear a keynote speaker comment on the fact that they felt it worthy of notice if not downright unsatisfactory that none of the existing accredited archive and records management courses seemed to have a separate ‘digital’ module. At the time, and still to a point now, I would very much like further consideration of and collective owning up to the way in which ‘we’ continue to be conflicted as to how separate or distinct we see our digital recordkeeping competence as being from our more general and/or non-digital recordkeeping competence? As a survey conducted by ARA SAT alongside the 2012 Annual Conference showed a majority of those who responded did not consider themselves to be ‘Digital Archivists’, but the reasons for that varied. Some refused that title because and I quote ‘I am an archivist that deals with all material regardless of format’. Another commented ‘aren’t digital archives just part of being an archivist’. Others however felt that the title Digital Archivist ‘implies the archivist only works with digital records’, or refused the title because of ‘no practical experience’ or because ‘I lack the technical skills/knowledge’.

To be sure things have now changed and rightly or wrongly modules explicitly labelled as ‘digital’ have appeared on most of the accredited archives and records management courses. Then again, another change has been the development of entire Masters programmes that are explicitly labelled as ‘Digital Curation’. In some cases these have been developed from a more traditional archives and records management background, such as the MSc offered by Aberystwyth. In others they have not, and so, a search on the phrase “digital curation” on the FindAMasters website returned the following hits, alongside the Aberystwyth course.

• MSc/GradDip/GradCert Digital Information Management, University College Dublin
• MSc/PGDip/PGCert Information Management and Preservation, University of Glasgow
• MA Digital Media, University of Huddersfield
• MA Digital Media, University of Hull
• MA Public History, Queen’s University Belfast
• MA/MSc/PGDip/PGCert Digital Humanities, University College London
• MSc/PGDip/PGCert Information Science, University College London
• MA Archives and Records Management, University College London
• MA Global Film and Television, University of Herefordshire
• MA Public History and Heritage, University of Derby
• GradCert Petroleum Data Management, Robert Gordon University Aberdeen

Quite an eclectic mix I think you would agree, but one which highlights perhaps the emergence of a multiplicity of routes into something we may or may not wish to recognise as a separate field of Digital Curation. Imagine for a minute that the Digital Preservation Coalition were to decide to accredit programmes in the same way as ARA. Which of these programmes would they see as within their remit? And where would we draw the line between DPC and ARA accreditation? Is digital curation the same as archives and records management or is it separate? Is the digital curation community of practice the same as the archives and records management one, or do they just overlap somewhat? From informal conversations with colleagues it is clear to me that these questions are now being felt as personal tensions. And that just as records managers perhaps face split allegiance to ARA and IRMS, and conservators feel the same with regards to ARA and ICON, those now working in more digital curation or research data management or similar roles are not necessarily seeing the ARA community as their natural home.

Obviously where you feel at home and how and with what you wish to identify yourself is going to be a personal matter, but where this discussion leads me is to another often unacknowledged point when it comes to the issue of defining digital recordkeeping competence (perhaps or perhaps not as distinct from general or existing recordkeeping competence) – this point is about the very idea of competencies and their link to practice in terms of both jobs and the communities that arise amongst those carrying out similar jobs and roles.

The definition of competence as ‘the ability to do something successfully or efficiently’ makes it very clear that competence is linked to doing. There are other definitions of course, but the evolution of the idea of competence has tended to be located, particularly in the form of competency frameworks, within an organisational performance management and employee development context. A competency framework is therefore in large part a statement of what a larger organization believes an individual needs to be able to do in order to be successful, in order to perform in accordance with the dictates of that larger organization. That larger organization may be an organization in the way we usually mean it, a business or agency, or, as with the ARA framework, it may mean a certain community or commonality of practice. The issue we face, that we have always faced in this community is that our commonality of practice is tenuous at best. What we all individually do and are expected to do within our various employment contexts and specialisms shows huge variation. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether or not we might be better off, if we stopped trying to conceive of ARA as a professional body manifesting a community or commonality of practice, and instead committed more whole-heartedly to the idea that it is a lobby group advocating for a certain commonality of purpose or belief, of holding the line for an authentic and trustworthy evidence base on which we can come to know our past, our identities and our rights. On that point I just mention that CILIP, for example, place the competencies in their Body of Professional Knowledge and Skills around a heart of Ethics and Values.

I realise that I have started to digress, but this context is important to the present discussion because I do think that the conceptualisation of competence as ability does cause us some difficulty in accepting that we have it. For example, this conceptualisation may lead us to doubt that we have competence in it until we have both done it, whatever it is, and, more pertinently for my own context, done it for ‘real’ and not just as an academic exercise in the classroom. And yet at the same time, even when we are doing it for real we still worry that we are not doing it competently, because perhaps no one has told us (e.g. in a classroom or through a standard) how we should be doing it. No one has told us of course because everyone is still working it out – we are the pioneers, the first people doing this and shaping new practices for dealing with digital material. Individually we may be able to negotiate this tension and to get to a place where we do feel we have personal competence, but collectively when we talk of digital recordkeeping competence, what does that mean and how will we know when ‘we’ have achieved it? Is it that we will only have achieved it when everyone who chooses to identify with the collective feels a personal competence? Or is it that we will only have achieved it when everyone who chooses to identify with the collective has a shared and formalised understanding of what it means to be competently working in it? Either way it seems to me that developing a general digital recordkeeping competence at this level is never going to be achieved in a once and for all sense, for what we are really talking about is our never-ending practice, quest or search to define and work out what doing recordkeeping involves, so that we can do it now and into the future.

At this level then, what I think we need to concentrate on and to do is this. We need to take chances with our practice, to experiment more and to be willing to step both into new roles and outside our past experiences and comfort zones. We are going to need to challenge our preconceptions, talk to and work with new people who do not share the same background as us, and open up and question our thinking about what we are doing. Only in this way will we develop enough of a community and commonality of practice in digital recordkeeping to allow us to know and to define what competence in it means. Alternatively we could just let those who want to do this spin off into their own separate and distinct community, with a separate and distinct history that starts perhaps not so much with the Dutch Manual as with the OAIS reference model.

This then is one meaning of digital recordkeeping competence and one answer to the question of how we build it across the profession. I imagine though that this was not the answer you were looking for. Your interest is perhaps more in an answer to the question of knowing what it is you need to know or do in order to develop your potential to work in a digital recordkeeping context, to equip yourself for a future and to keep a job in the brave new world. To end then I will give a brief answer to this question as well.

Firstly what you need to do is Watch your Attitude. For, if you take the attitude that this is about bridging a gap from analogue to digital, from old to new practice, you will place yourself in the decidedly unenviable position of being squarely in the middle of a chasm between two opposites. I would suggest that the first step is not to see it that way, but rather to take the attitude that this is about building a better relationship with technology. How do you do that? Well one way is to get to know it better – where it takes the form of an actual person, a so-called IT person, you might be able to just talk to them, but even so it helps if you can speak the same language and have some understanding of their culture and worldview. On this slide I have put links to two recent guidebooks, which might be worth consulting in advance of any such cross-cultural encounters.

Getting to know technology as actual people is one thing, but you can also get to know technology through the body of knowledge and skills that has grown around it, something we might wish to label computer science. How deeply you wish to go into this is probably a matter of personal choice, but again as a guide, the DigCCurr Matrix I mentioned earlier does have a list that starts to delineate some aspects of this knowledge that seem, in their view, pre-requisite for working in Digital Curation. How do you do this? Well you could just read a book, or complete one of the many online training courses that are available, see for example EdX or Code Academy. Or you could buy a low cost raspberry pi and try to get it to work. Or, as I may have been known to do, you can hover over your children as they do their GSCE computer science homework and badger them to explain it to you. Ultimately then, I say to you that you need to Keep Learning. It may be that this learning is more or less directed by your work context. If you are working in this area, what you need to know, such as a particular system, or a particular technique, will be clear, but even so I would say that whether or not this is the case, you should always seek to get under the hood of technology. The stuff of which records are made has always been more than just paper, it has been people and systems of organisation. We have always sought to maintain an awareness of this fact and to surface how the resulting stuff and the systems that produced them are interdependent. Whether those systems are bureaucratic, social or technological, if we do not build our knowledge of them, we will not be able to do so. Thank you.

Defining Lines: Evolution of the Archive Collection Policy in the UK Context

This is the script for a presentation delivered at the annual international Seminar and Symposium of the Association of Canadian Archivists Student Chapter, University of British Columbia, held on February 14th to 15th,2019.

Today I am here to tell you a story. Hopefully it is not one that you have heard before. As we all know stories have power, particularly those which through community re-telling become a part of that community’s identity, its tradition and folklore. As an archival educator, I have become increasingly aware of my role as a re-teller of tales. Every year, I find myself re-telling these tales to the next generation of archivists and records managers, and perhaps even more worryingly I also find myself presenting these tales as theory, archival theory, appraisal theory, etc. Claiming epistemic capital in this way may be part of the academic game, but I do increasingly worry that presenting community folklore as if it were scientific fact is not doing anyone any favours. What follows then is just a story and it is one that I have made up, for both your enjoyment and information, in response to the theme of this symposium – Policy matters.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines policy as “A principle or course of action adopted or proposed as desirable, advantageous, or expedient”, but when we talk of policies we are more likely to be thinking of the formal documents drawn up by organisations to outline the principle or course of action adopted, and who will be responsible for taking it forward. In the UK, a new Archive Service Accreditation Scheme has recently been introduced, and in order to gain that accreditation, services are required to have policies governing Collections management, Collections development, Collections information, Collections care and conservation and Collections Access and engagement. In most of these cases (with the one exception of Collections management), they are also expected to have and to be able to produce separate written policy documents. There has as a result, been a lot of policy writing going on in the UK of late, but there is also history here. Prior to Archive Service Accreditation, there were other standards of good practice in the UK and one of these was ‘A standard for record repositories’. This standard was developed in the late 1980s and was published in 1990, under the aegis of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts.

The HMC as it was more commonly known was established in 1869 and focused primarily on privately owned materials of historical interest. It merged with the Public Record Office in 2003 when that body became The National Archives. The standard was voluntary and was not accompanied by any formal accreditation or registration mechanism. It covered areas such as constitution and finance, staff, acquisition and access, but also contained an appendix, later incorporated into the main body of the text, that set out requirements in respect of situation, construction, security, fire protection, environment and storage etc. These requirements related to the parallel but separate inspection regime carried out by the Public Record Office on places of deposit for public records. The standard suggested that ‘the governing body should delegate to the archivist in charge powers to […] develop and implement policies concerning the record repository, under the governing body’s general direction’, but the only policy document explicitly mentioned was a collecting policy. This statement of collecting policy was to be kept under review and made publicly available in the record repository. A copy could also be sent to the HMC (Brian Smith, ‘A standard for record repositories’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, Volume 12, no 2, 1991, pp. 114-122). This standard remained in place largely unchanged until the arrival of Archives Service Accreditation.

Following on from the standard’s initial publication, the HMC approached repositories across England, Wales and Scotland inviting them to indicate whether or not they could adopt the standard, and as part of this correspondence many collecting policies were sent in to the Commission. As can be seen from the quote below, it does appear that formalising their collection policy was something of a novelty for many of those approached.

“Many respondents indicated that this was the first time the staff, let alone the governing bodies, had actually tried to define their collection policy in any formal way, and that they found the exercise both timely and helpful, with the provision and quality of services in central and local government and the universities under close scrutiny and the service providers looking for yardsticks against which to measure their performance.”

And the authors of this article (Christopher Kitching and Ian Hart, ‘Collection Policy Statements’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, Volume 16, no. 1, 1995, pp. 7-14.) also reflected that the statements they had received showed ‘considerable variety’ and ranged from ‘just a few lines to extremely detailed expositions’. As a result of this variety a working party drew up guidance, in the form of a checklist of the sorts of things that might be covered in a Collection Policy Statement. This checklist published with this article included areas like; Information which identifies the repository and the governing body, information about the legal status of the repository or other source of its authority to collect, information about the scope of its collecting, information about the process of collection and information concerning access. This checklist was re-published by The National Archives in 2004 and can be found here.

The authors of the 1995 article acknowledged that they were privileged in having been able to see so many collection policy statements and, as such, they felt that they could offer a few thoughts or reflections. For example, from this perspective they strongly believed that having a clear statement of collection policy, of the range of records that would or would not be taken in, could only bring benefit and that such statements needed to be ‘given due publicity rather than filed away for internal reference only’. They also saw that, properly done, such statements, could provide ‘an opportunity to stand back from actual current practice and consider broader strategic issues; where appropriate to review the strengths and weaknesses of the holdings, and in the latter case to explain what (if anything) will be done about them.’ In recognising the collection policy as a vital first step towards working out a strategy for future collection, there is therefore a foreshadowing of the focus on collections development in the more recent Archives Service Accreditation Scheme. To meet this newer standard, as well as the many more policy documents required, that for collection development, must cover ‘the acquisition (passive and proactive accruals), appraisal and deaccessioning of material’ and it must be accompanied by a plan ‘which details the actions that are being taken to appraise and rationalise existing holdings and to identify gaps and priorities for future collecting’.

Going back to the campfire then, I guess the time has come for me to own up to some of the authorial intent behind my story today. As some of you will no doubt be aware, in the story that the archival community tells itself about its thinking on collecting and selecting, us Brits are, as seems to be the case in a number of stories produced in Hollywood, pretty much ignored except in as much as we provide the villain. This villain’s name is Sir Hilary Jenkinson, an important figure in the development of the archives profession in the UK, who died in 1961 and is most famous for his influential volume a Manual of Archive Administration, first published in 1922. When it comes to this appraisal story, Jenkinson’s villain is pitted against Theodore Roosevelt Schellenberg, the hero of the piece, the father of appraisal theory and an American to boot. Schellenberg was a similarly important figure in the development of the archives profession in the USA. He died in 1970 and his most famous publication, Modern Archives: Principles and Techniques was published in 1956.

As the story goes, Jenkinson’s unenlightened and old fashioned position that the archivist should not be involved in making decisions about what to keep or what not to keep was only overthrown by the modern and forward looking Schellenberg who saw making such decisions as very much a part of that role. From that point onwards, the story continues very much on the North of this continent, with American developments in documentation strategy and Canadian ones in total archives and macroappraisal, and the rest of the world, with the possible exception of one German archivist called Hans Booms, doing, presumably, nothing at all. To be clear, I do not wish to denigrate or downplay the importance of the developments I have just mentioned. Nonetheless, I do intend to make a serious point about how, when our stories come to define us too much, when we are so comfortable in their re-telling that they cease to make us think, then we need to take care and perhaps seek out some new ones to add to the repertoire. And so for the rest of this talk, I shall try to tell such a new story, and it is, unapologetically, one that comes from the UK. The early 1990s might have been the first time that many UK repostiories had tried to define their collection policy in a formal written statement, but that does not mean that they had not been collecting, and thinking about what they would collect before then.

In the 1950s the UK Public Record Office, where Jenkinson worked, was facing many similar problems to those of the US National Archives, where Schellenberg worked. A Committee on Departmental Records was appointed with Sir James Grigg in the chair. Reporting in 1954 the deliberations of the committee led to the Public Records Act of 1958, but more than that, as an article in the Journal of the Society of Archivists in 1955 put it ‘The crux of the whole report’ was ‘setting up machinery for making selection of records to preserve’ ( P.E. Jones LL.B., F.R.Hist.S. (1955) The Grigg report, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 1:1, 7-9, DOI: 10.1080/00379815509513594 ). This machinery involved two reviews, one when the material was five years old and one when it was 25 years old. The first was carried out by Departmental Record Officers in respect of continuing administrative use, or what Schellenberg called primary value, and the second was carried out by both Departmental Record Officers and PRO Inspecting Officers and also took into account historical value, or what Schellenberg called secondary value. I do not think anyone has published detailed research into how Jenkinson reacted in relation to the Grigg committee, but that his position was perhaps more nuanced than it is sometimes portrayed can be seen from the quotation on this slide. Indeed it is perhaps best summed up in his own words, in a reflection on Schellenberg’s book Modern Archives, as follows (Hilary Jenkinson (1957) Shorter communication, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 1:5, 147-149, DOI: 10.1080/00379815509513638);

“The necessity for decreasing by selection of some kind the intolerable quantity of documents accumulated by modern administration is very well known to all of us who have had the responsibility for preserving modern as well as ancient Archives, but it is known as a disagreeable necessity: disagreeable because we know also that there can be no absolutely safe criterion for Elimination”

As Cook, McDonald and Welch noted, there were attempts following the publication of the Grigg Report to apply the same sort of system in local record offices (Michael Cook , L. J. McDonald & Edwin Welch, “The management of records”, Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol 3 no 8, 1968, pp. 417-423.). The difference of scale between central and local government meant however that the conditions did not exist where the originating departments were ‘big enough and complex enough to develop a sophisticated records management function, capable of carrying out a sensible selection policy’. In some local record offices therefore this period saw some archivists in these contexts increasingly developing a records management function from their own office. By the late 1960s, selection was being spoken of ‘as the nub of records management’, and in conjunction with retention schedules and documentation plans. Selection and appraisal were being carried out, and checklists of the sort of values to be considered in making selection decisions could be found. Indeed by the late 1960s, Cook, McDonald and Welch felt able to say that ‘All archivists are used to appraising records and attributing scales of value to their contents’ although they did add the caveat that ‘few of them are accustomed to deciding what sources of information are not there, and giving thought to providing the missing sources.’

And so then we come to the 1970s and here I choose to set my story side by side with that which is usually told, by bringing together two presidents; F Gerald Ham, president of the Society of American Archivists from 1973 to 1974, and Felix Hull who was president of the Society of Archivists in the UK from 1976 until the early 1980s. Both gave presidential addresses, and in the appraisal story that is most retold, Ham’s plays a significant part, whilst Hull’s are completely absent. The part of Ham’s 1974 address that is most frequently quoted is this, in which he both highlights the importance of selection and also wonders why it is being done so badly. (F. Gerald Ham, “The Archival Edge”, The American Archivist, Vol 38, no 1, 1975, pp. 5-13.)

“Our most important and intellectually demanding task is to make an informed selection of information that will provide the future with a representative record of human experience in our time. But why must we do it so badly?”

In part, this question arose following earlier criticism, from Howard Zinn and others that urged the American archival profession to consider how ‘the archival record in the United States is biased towards the rich and powerful elements in our society’. What is less well referenced however is that Ham went on to identify five factors ‘institutionalization, bulk, missing data, vulnerable records and technology’ that had changed the conditions in which archive professionals were acting and which had ‘permanently altered the job of the archivist, forcing him to make choices that he never had to make before’. Ham also made a number of suggestions that might act as a response to these changing conditions – specialized archives, state archival networks and an emerging model for urban documentation whereby additional archives could be established within major urban areas, alongside the state archives. In short much of his response in the face of changing conditions was to urge the commitment of ‘a far greater proportion of our intellectual resources to developing guidelines and strategies for a nationwide system of archival data collecting’.

Just as in the 1950s archivists had responded to the problem of bulk (in terms of more stuff) by limiting the amount of material they would retain permanently by instigating records management within their organisations. In the 1970s they were responding to another bulk problem (in terms of both more stuff and more people demanding more stuff was kept to be more representative) by suggesting the establishment of more archival institutions and a need to co-operate more collectively on collecting. This need was less keenly felt in the United Kingdom, where a network of record offices had been slowly establishing itself over the course of the 20th century (mostly in England) and where there was quite literally a lot less ground to cover. Felix Hull was deeply embedded in this network, having worked at Essex Record Office, and been County Archivist in both Berkshire and Kent. On his appointment as President of the Society of Archivists in 1976, he was the first local authority archivist to take on that role.

Giving his presidential address in December 1977 Hull started with some veiled criticism of Jenkinson, whom he had known, writing that perhaps ‘like all of us, [he was] less able as the years passed to adapt fully to changed circumstances and ideas’ (Felix Hull, “Jenkinson and the ‘acquisitive’ record office” Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol 6, no. 1, 1978, pp. 1-9). Hull noted that Jenkinson’s work at the Public Record Office had placed him in a different context to that which Hull had experienced of the local record office as variously ‘acquisitive’ or ‘comprehensive’ or ‘composite’. Those working in local record offices operated on ‘the basic assumption of comprehensiveness’, rather than, as the Public Record Office had done explicitly since the Grigg Report of the 1950s and perhaps implicitly before then, on the basic assumption of selectiveness. Moreover, the reality of Hull’s collecting experience, all directed towards this goal of comprehensiveness, was a world away from ‘custodial transfer as of right or by order’ and more one of negotiation with donors, and relationships in which ‘tensions can arise between professional duty towards the records and our equally professional duty towards the owner and his wishes’. This was not a man who was not facing difficult decisions on a regular basis, when it came to what to and what not to collect. Hull returned to the subject of selection on a number of occasions and on one of them he got, to my mind, right to the heart of the matter, posing this question and making this comment (Felix Hull, “The archivist and society” Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol 6, no. 3, 1979, pp. 125-130; Felix Hull, “The appraisal of documents – problems and pitfalls” Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol 6, no. 5, 1980, pp. 287-291).

“Quite bluntly so long as we are not involved in selection we can happily be all things to all archives, but once we assume the sword and scales of justice – what then?”

“For some archivists, I am sure, this dilemma raises problems of action and of morality which they feel ill equipped to handle”

Many people I know, start the story of appraisal with Schellenberg, but I prefer to start and end it with this question posed by Hull. Jenkinson may have been a bit blinkered in his refusal to deal with it, but at least he recognised that it did pose a whole host of larger questions, the facing of which he felt to be disagreeable, but accepted might be a necessity. That necessity was avoided for a very long time, in part by some nifty footwork in the 1950s that focussed the attention for a while on selection as establishing procedures for records management and the internal transfer of material to mostly government archives. This diversionary tactic lost its power in the 1970s, when selection was reframed against the idea of ‘comprehensiveness’ and of a more representative view and record of society. Faced with this reframing another diversionary tactic was employed, that of establishing more archives and focusing attention on archival co-operation in a national network of some kind. This focus is noticeable in the American discussions of documentation strategy in the 1980s and in the provision of the 1990 standard for record repositories that ‘in acquiring records every effort should be made to avoid conflict and duplication with the collecting policies of other record repositories.’ I do not have time to talk about everything that has happened since, but I will end by suggesting that, with the recent emergence of a community archives discourse within the profession, we might perhaps be trying another diversionary tactic. This time, rather than establishing more mainstream archival institutions, we are perhaps trying to co-opt (whether they like it or not) a whole host of citizen archivists into ‘our’ network as we strive to be ‘all things to all archives’.

The embers of our campfire are glowing and I come to the end of my tale. Remember the stories we tell are meant to make us think and we must never use them as an excuse not to do so.

Machines Make Records: The Future of Archival Processing

When I was writing this presentation, I found myself remembering Depeche Mode’s 1984 single People are People, partly because midlife leaves me prone to nostalgia and partly because it seemed to act as a shorthand for a number of points that I wanted to make

Firstly I would like to remind us that, if we define people as our users, or our audiences, or our stakeholders, we cannot avoid ‘othering’ them to some extent. We are now in a relationship with them and we have also defined the terms of that relationship, of that engagement, reducing them to those of use, attention and stake. In this presentation I am starting instead from the position that archivists, records managers and conservators are all just people and like all people they are facing an increasingly uncertain and difficult environment, particularly it seems with respect to the ways in which technology is advancing and shaping a reality that must now be shared not just with other people, animals and inanimate objects, but also with a whole host of artificially intelligent systems.

Returning to the idea of People are People then, a question that is increasingly being asked, and no longer just within science fiction, is that of are machines people too? At what point could or should an A.I. (artificial intelligence) be allowed ‘personhood’, legally, ethically or socially speaking? The robots are coming scream the headlines and scandals such as the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica debacle demonstrate the truth of what Terry Cook, speaking in an entirely different context over 20 years ago, highlighted when he pointed out that “Our mindsets and solutions come from and reflect generations of practice in a paper-based world […] This older world is no longer holding.”[1] I would venture that many of us, not as archivists or records managers or conservators, but just as people, are nervous, scared even about how the newer world is shaping up. We start to worry that our basic literacy skills are lacking as coding is taught in schools and the bright young tech giants run rings around government and citizen alike.

That we are not alone in our anxiety should be of some comfort, and yet for those in the recordkeeping community in particular, it is actually just another worry, because it means we also worry that we are not fulfilling what we have long seen as our role and raison d’etre – the maintenance of everyone else’s trust and confidence in and through access to a transparent, interpretable, reliable record of events, identities and transactions. Today I would like to outline the position I am currently taking in the face of all this worry and to offer a view of the future of archival processing.

Paradoxical Thinking

This is one of three possible endings to a presentation given at the Memory, Identity and Trust 2018 conference in Dundee. The beginning can be found here, and the other two possible endings at The Age of Authenticity and The Authentic Self (Ending 2).

Another thing that I mentioned back in 2016 was the autonomy-dependence paradox. This I mentioned in connection with the authentic self. What was depressing back in 2016 and is consequently even more depressing in 2018 was that I recognised this paradox as one I had been stuck in since at least 2010. I first got stuck in it as a result of pondering the concept of organic wholeness that underpinned the archival artefact of the fonds. Looking at it in those terms had led me to the impossibility of how it was possible to have knowledge of (and describe) a world around us, without, in the words of the scholars Maturana and Varela “any point of reference independent of ourselves that would give certainty to our descriptions and cognitive assertions”.[1] Looking at it in terms of the authentic self, had led to another impossibility, that of how it could possibly make sense that a concern with one’s self could not be separated from a concern with the social conditions under which the self becomes possible, or to put it another way, how the social context is both in opposition to and ‘an indispensable condition of’ an authentic self. In all honesty I feel I am probably resigned to the fact that I will now never escape from it, especially since another way in which I have recently come to see this paradox is in terms of the explanatory gap within philosophical thinking on consciousness. This gap is broadly defined as ‘our incomplete understanding of how consciousness might depend upon a non-conscious substrate, especially a physical substrate’ and metaphysics is most definitely out of my league.[2]

The Authentic Self (Ending 2)

This is one of three possible endings to a presentation given at the Memory, Identity and Trust 2018 conference in Dundee. The beginning can be found here, and the other two possible endings at The Age of Authenticity and Paradoxical Thinking.

Those of you who were here in 2016 will remember that my comments about the authentic self, arose tangentially from some work I had been doing to engage with the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. What I didn’t explain at the time, was that this work was in part designed as a way to explore the, as McKemmish and Piggott had put it in 2013, ‘binary opposition of the personal and corporate archive in modern archival theory and practice’.[1] My rationale at the time was as follows;

• the personal/corporate binary has often manifested itself in debates about what is and is not a ‘proper’ archive, what is or is not within our purview – the archives and manuscripts tradition and all that.
• the best place to ‘see’ the binary from was therefore in the negotiation of (an ideally personal/corporate influenced) boundary we had placed around our field

The boundary I chose to negotiate was the boundary between ARM and HCI, because HCI, along with personal information management, was one of the fields to which those who perceived a lack of attention to the personal context within the ARM field were starting to look. I did not want to negotiate this boundary alone, so I also recruited some volunteers from within the ARM profession to look at it with me.[2]

The Age of Authenticity

This is one of three possible endings to a presentation given at the Memory, Identity and Trust 2018 conference in Dundee. The beginning can be found here, and the other two possible endings at The Authentic Self and Paradoxical Thinking.

Should you go looking for it, as I did, there is a huge amount written about authenticity. Some would argue that there’s enough of it just in the archival field, but if you now think about that sort of amount multiplied by multiple other fields; archaeology, art, music, tourism, philosophy and so on, you start to get the idea. Some of these fields, e.g. philosophy, and dare I say it archival studies, might like to claim greater ownership of the debate around authenticity, by reason of a more sustained consideration of it over the longer term, but it does seem that pretty much everyone can and has put their oar in at some point, so we have more recent work from philosophy – still digging away at it – such as Varga’s “Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal”, from anthropology we have Thomas Fillitz and Jamie Saris’ “Debating Authenticity: Concepts of Modernity in Anthropological Perspective” and from an explicitly interdisciplinary outlook Maiken Umbach and Mathew Humphrey’s “Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept” 2018.[1]  As well as all this academic input to the debate, there is also more ‘everyday’ and popular input going on, with the discussions around fake news and the way in which, as Umbach and Humphrey discuss, authenticity is being seen and sold as some kind of “antidote to political disillusionment.”[2] Surveying all this discussion and debate, what then can we learn?

The Authentic Self: Personal Identity and Integrity

This post consists of the script of a presentation to be given at the Memory, Identity and Trust 2018 conference, held in Dundee at the end of April. It has been posted because it has three possible endings and those who only hear one of those endings might be interested in finding out what the other ones were. It has not been edited very much from the script that was delivered…..

I just want to start by thanking the organisers for establishing the wonderful series of conferences of which this is the current incarnation. As everyone will be aware, it is quite difficult in the increasingly busy pace of life to find any head space at all, but every couple of years or so, these conferences in Dundee have given me an impetus and a deadline that has forced me to make that space and also a series of dots that I have had to connect. As such, I am now starting to discern a line of thinking that has emerged and developed through these conferences. This line of thinking was left hanging in 2016 in a concern with the authentic self and a suggestion that what lay at the heart of recordkeeping was a view of authenticity that engendered a perspective from which a concern with one’s self could not be separated from a concern with the social conditions under which the self became possible. What follows is the story of how I have developed that position over the past two years. I will take advantage of the fact that this is a presentation, and not an article, to tell this story in, what feels to me, a more authentic way. By this I mean I will not present it in a straightforward fashion designed to suggest clear logical progression leading to unarguable conclusion. I do not seek to either argue or to reach a definitive conclusion, I seek rather to give you an insight into my emerging thought processes as a prompt to make you examine your own.