2. Herbert Bayer for General Electric, 1944
2
I suppose "the noisy archives" is a kind of contradiction. Or perhaps something to be avoided.
We'll take up quiet a bit later. But in the meantime I want to use noisiness as a scheme to get
us closer to some ideas about archives, their present and their future.
4. 4
There's no better place to start than CACOPHONY. Babble surrounds archives. Everyone has
something to say about their future, whether or not they know anything about it. It's a
confused, disorienting, anxious time.
5. 5
Anxiety and archives seem to go especially well together. It's been hard not to feel that way, at least in
the past few years.
Some of this anxiety is our own. More comes from the public, from our parent organizations or from
the state, and speaks through us.
6. THE ACCELERANDO:
“THE GREATEST EFFLORESCENCE
OF CIVILIZATION IN HISTORY,
A NEW RENAISSANCE.”
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars
6
This is how the utopian-minded speculative fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson defines what he calls
the Accelerando (AH-CHE-LE-RANDO) It’s a speeding-up of development in all realms: exploration,
invention, science and philosophy. But it also comes with insecurity.
7. "And yet still, with all the blossoming of
human effort and confidence of the accelerando,
there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger....
A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge,
a manic golden age: the Accelerando.
And no one could say what would happen next."
7
"And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and confidence of the accelerando, there was a
sense of tension in the air, of danger....A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge, a manic
golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could say what would happen next."
He's talking about the 2200s, but this is also a good description of the present.
8. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
8
Here are just a few of the issues we might choose to worry about on any given day.
9. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
9
I don't know how my colleagues at Internet Archive can sleep at night thinking about digital instability.
Collecting digital records is like collecting fireflies. Solutions are short-term and throttled by the
deceleration of Moore's Law. As Brewster Kahle said to me the other night, collecting bits inevitably
means incurring "massive unfunded liabilities." If, for instance, we go with one common estimate that
it costs $2000 to preserve a TB "forever," that means that we should endow each new PB that comes
online to the tune of $2 million. Impossible.
10. Thank you.
MAKE THE END INSPIRING
http://blog.dshr.org/2014/05/talk-at-seagate.html
10
Here David Rosenthal, co-founder of the LOCKSS project, looks at economic models for long-term
storage, and criticizes the idea that long-term storage will be free. I won't replicate his lengthy
argument, but he sums up his results in this graph: The graph shows the annual cost of storing all the
data accumulated since year zero, relative to the cost in year zero. After a decade the cost has increased
more than eight times; if in year zero storage was 12% of your budget in year ten it is 100% of your budget.
(Kryder rate, which is annual percentage drop in $/GB; endowment costs.) "Disk costs are
now about 7 times as expensive as it would have been had the industry maintained its pre-2010 Kryder rate. The red
lines show the range of industry projections for the Kryder rate going forward, between 20%/yr and 10%/yr. If these
projections pan out, disk in 2020 will be between 100 and 300 times as expensive as it would have been had the
industry maintained its pre-2010 Kryder rate. I don't think many organizations appreciate the impact this will have on the
cost of storing data for the long term."
11. 11
We fear loss. Of course, loss can be formative, because it encourages people to fill apparent gaps in the
record. But from where many of us sit, loss is publicly unspeakable and privately vexing. Speaking as a
moving image archivist (and in the past few years, unwilling digital custodian), I find it fascinating how
moving image archives can pretend to be eternal. Most are young, less than thirty years old, and most
are accidental; they were founded in response to unmet needs, rarely according to premeditated plans.
Both moving image archives and digital repositories aspire to collect some of the most unstable and
ephemeral media forms and preserve them forever. Can we imagine a more presumptuous mission?
12. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
12
Digital instability, analog glut.
13. 13
Abundance is terrifying. Sometimes we carefully select what to collect, but too often we collect because we
can. And now we're realizing that we can't keep up with the vast number of physical materials needing a
home. All too often, we address "can't" as a technical or economic issue, rather than a cultural or social
issue. We are not always doing a great job thinking about why we collect and what we should (or should not)
collect. By this I mean to say that archival appraisal is sometimes poorly thought through, or dictated by
external conditions about which archivists aren't consulted. And without stating it clearly, many of us are
asking this question: do physical objects have the right to exist? It seems both callous and surreal, but it is
one of the major cultural questions of our time.
14. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
14
How many of you feel that your work is well understood?
15. Bit rot
Format obsolescence
"I can't play my VCR tapes"
"Don't films explode if you don't copy them to DVD?"
Distrust of the cloud, the hacker, the state
Dot-com phobia
"I can't quit Facebook, they have my photos."
Privacy worries
Pervasive surveillance undercuts archival legitimacy
We're not collecting enough! (before 5 June 2013)
Anything we save might be used against us
(after 5 June 2013)
15
Triggered by the press, the public conflates many ideas into a giant hairball of anxiety. No one but us
can give them clarity and reassurance, and it can be hard for us to speak loudly enough to break
through the static.
16. Text
16
We don't get sufficient credit for our work. We're taken for granted. Most members of the
public (and surprisingly, many people who work in the same organizations we do) assume
that collecting and preservation happens all by itself. And it always bothers me when I see
another news story about some valuable document that was found in a barn, an attic, a
closet, a hole in the ground. Found in spite of its never having been collected in an archives.
We show up in the press when we aren't able to do our jobs properly.
17. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
17
We have to make the case for our work to our funders and parent organizations. This isn't always a
sympathetic audience. To fund, as Thomas Osborne says, a repository that "awaits a constituency or
public whose limits are of necessity unknown" is sometimes a difficult sell.
18. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
18
We operate within a web of constraints.
19. 19
I don't have anything new and different to say about copyright and IPR. Lockdown used to be the
default condition of almost all cultural materials. While this is slowly starting to change in the
United States, there seems to be a bit less flexibility in the UK and Europe, though ongoing
discussions seem encouraging. And of course copyright is just one of a series of barriers to access
and reuse. But everyday practice is moving beyond outdated frameworks. Cultural institutions,
archivists and curators are trending access-positive, even though we're often handcuffed. And
we're discussing workarounds that allow us increased uses while still observing the law. So while
the battle for universal access to archives won't be won tomorrow, I’m happier than I was a few
years ago.
20. 20
I'm certain that we'll ultimately resolve copyright problems that today seem intractable. Today's
copyright wars will seem quaint sooner than we imagine. And as cultural custodians, we're obliged to
take the long view, which means we shouldn't postpone thinking about issues that last longer than
copyright and pose more profound questions.
For instance, how can we temper openness with respect? Questions of indigenous and community
concerns about cultural and intellectual property, traditional cultural expressions and the moral rights
of creators, all pose issues that go far beyond the bounds of copyright. These issues will outlive
shorter-term discussions and the work of coming to terms with them is part of shaping the kind of
world we hope to live in.
21. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
21
In the early 2000s I, like others, was seduced by the peculiarly, but not exclusively, Californian idea of
digital abundance. But now I find it hard to imagine an era without scarcity. Digital abundance has not
brought an end to financial constraint.
22. Digital instability
Analog glut
Public misunderstanding
Indifference to culture
Legal constraints
Financial sustainability
Outdated perspectives
22
All of these anxieties (which in their own way are also opportunities) suggest that we need to think
very differently about our practice.
23. Detroit, February 2011
23
We could address the misunderstandings. We need to push forward a bundle of new narratives that
speak to the centrality of archives in the world. Because to engage in archival activity is to intervene in
history's flow. Even a passive collection that simply responds to queries plays an interventionist role.
24. 24
I suspect that one way to become clearer about our course is to reinvest the archives with a sense of
intentionality. Each record was created for a reason, and the intentionality of particular records
coalesce into the archives, but a tradition of archival neutrality keeps us from fixing on intentions,
missions and outcomes. But we need to do more than preserve the cultural heritage for the future. And
archivists should be encouraged to play much more of an interpretive role themselves.
26. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/archiving-is-the-new-folk-art/
26
We have competition. Today the spread of digital culture has rendered archival activity
universal. To quote archivist/provocateur/poet Kenneth Goldsmith: "The advent of digital
culture has turned each one of us into an unwitting archivist....The ways in which culture is
distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact
itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption..."
27. 27
We have competition. I am a tremendous fan of YouTube. It is an amazing repository that
offers a hit for almost every query, that permits anyone to upload their work and let it
intermingle with the work of their cultural heroes. It's become a magnet for personal media,
filling the persistent gap between the world of massive personal media production and the
archival ecosystem that hasn't collected it. But we might describe its relationship with its
users as a noncommittal handshake. Archival persistence, digital longevity and resistance
from outside interference are traded in for the appearance of openness, an absence of
latency, and an omnivirous collecting policy curated, if curated at all, by machines that know
not to expose certain videos to Chinese IP addresses. Just as we are willingly exchanging the
resiliency of venerable copper-wired telephone networks for the stimulation of app-driven
but unreliable wireless smartphones, we have exchanged the traditional archives for the
apparent archives, gaining an appearance of completeness that is in fact full of gaps.
28. 28
Next to the austerity wreaked on cultural institutions as a consequence of the fiscal crisis of
the state, YouTube is the biggest element of subversion against the structure, practices, and
culture of established archives. In place of the canonical archival missions of appraisal,
preservation and access, it offers an incoherent matrix with the impression of order. Its
particular type of creative destruction has marginalized legacy archives but given the world
much they can't. No established archives will ever serve as many videos to as many people. It
appropriates the eyes and ears of the public by offering easy access to subsets of cultural
expression unavailable elsewhere without great effort. It enables countless instances of media
and multimedia authorship & remix that legacy archives never wanted to enable and could
never have enabled on their own. I doubt we can catch up with them. And if we were to stop
ten people on the street and ask them whether they've ever used a video archives, they would
say "yes, YouTube."
29. CROSSTALK
29
Noise can be distracting, but noise can help our thinking leap out of familiar territory. Noise
spills out of silos. Crosstalk complicates lines of authority.
30. 30
We talk too little. We are an established discipline, but a precarious field. Conversations about
our future happen over our heads. In the United States collections close and go to larger
institutions. In Canada they're sometimes disposed of. Defunding happens with the stroke of
a bureaucrat's pen. Or - and this occurs much more often - a collection and its custodians
quietly languish from indifference and lack of support. We can't rely exclusively on external
forces to maintain the status quo — if the status quo is even worth maintaining. There's of
course considerable academic interest and discussion about archives. And, more or less
informed, the public weighs in. And yes, we're here at a conference that enables this kind of
conversation. But could the noise that occurs at conferences also occur within the archival
institution?
31. Activist Archivists
handout card,
Autumn 2012
31
Instead many of us rarely look up from our processing tables. There's a relatively small group
of people who feel sufficiently secure to be outspoken at conferences, to tweet their thoughts
and to ask difficult questions, but free speech and the power to implement change (and write
checks) somehow don't seem to go together. Meta-archival discussions about our mission
and how we can best realize it aren't the property of just the empowered few — they should
be open to all of us. This conversation needs to increase in volume and it needs to happen
more often than once a year.
32. 32
I don't bring this up simply to trigger chatter between departments or discussion between
managers and workers, even though those are all good. My intention is to encourage
experimentation. But we'll come back to this.
33. [permaculture diagram here]
33
Over the past few years I've become one of those people who believes archives and archival
practice can learn a lot from other disciplines: we often hear about cross-fertilization and
reciprocal influences between archives, libraries, museums, the GLAMs. But I think we might
look even further. Here is the permaculture diagram, as coined by Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren in 1978. There's a lot here for us. [EXPLAIN]
35. 35
I have become convinced that we should also try to make archives venues for conversation.
We can only profit from bringing social and collaborative research and production closer to
collections. This is one of those cases where changes that might seem small in the long term
can have extremely significant effects.
Allow me, if you will, to present an example from my own practice.
36. 36
This is a transactional space under construction, a repository where conversation is welcomed. It's our
library in San Francisco, in May 2004, just before we shelved the books. While it is not an archives, we
hold archival collections and unique or rare materials that we believe have archival value.
Starting for our own use, it's become a public collection with approximately 90,000 books, periodicals
and items of print ephemera. In recent years we have given ephemera and out-of-the-ordinary
periodicals precedence over monographs. What do we hold? Image-rich, evidence-rich materials,
materials that cast doubt on received ideas. Books we're interested in. Holdings are mostly published,
but many of them (especially periodicals) are unique holdings, and a significant segment of our
ephemera collection may be unique. No catalog; subjects are arranged in clusters starting with the
local (San Francisco) and ending with space. Like many archives, we are great at helping people find
what they aren't looking for, and dicey about specific questions. We dislike query-based discovery (no
catalog) and privilege serendipity. And at least one day a week we are there to help patrons.
37. 37
After we built this, our friends who teach at art schools discovered us, and brought their classes.
Suddenly we were mobbed. Today we host around 1000 people per year, even though we've had to cut
our open hours to one day a week because of our own arts commissions. But we got fiscal sponsorship
so we can accept grants and donations and are working on expanding to 30 hours/week.
38. 38
We're appropriation friendly, and warmly encourage visitors to scan, shoot and copy. We assume their
use is transformative, and the vast majority of our materials are in public domain anyway. Here people
are shooting plates from the 1890 US Census atlas, which was the last to speak of the American
frontier.
And here is our big idea: A few years in, we realized we were no longer simply a repository, but a
workshop. In fact we don't think the term "library" fairly describes what this is. We think such places
(and there are several dozen or more in the US) point to some possible futures for cultural institutions.
39. 39
This has changed our lives. Wednesdays are our most exciting days.
Hundreds of projects have been made, hatched or discussed in this room. Sooner or later everyone
comes to visit.
Discoveries:
younger audience (<27, approx 70% female, artists, activists, researchers), don't know why / Immense
excitement with print materials.
Localism. Community support / This is just a small example, free of many of the day-to-day
challenges you experience, but it has been a fulfilling example of hospitality.
Core to the idea of a transactional space is the idea of hospitality, which comes to me from Verne Harris in South Africa, who in
turn is influenced by Jacques Derrida. It's also consistent with the numerous people who have advocated that repositories be
user-centered rather than collection-centered. Yet another way to think about it might be that the archives behaves a bit more
like a library than an organizational collection. In our moving image archives we interpret hospitality very much in access terms:
placing material online for unrestricted reuse. There are interesting implications to this idea —
Finally, we encourage talking, collaboration, noise.
40. 40
But hospitality is more than simply welcoming visitors; it's also welcoming their records. People
aggregate into artistic, regional, ethnic, gender-based and many other kinds of communities, and all
are communities in search of archives. There is a growing asymmetry in the historical record,
especially when now widely recognized that institutional histories fall far short of documenting lived
and social experience. We have focused on the fonds rather than the flavor. The public creates a richer
record than ever before, and it's more sensitized to the ephemerality of their life traces. Can we find
ways for personal records to enter public archives on a vastly increased scale? It's a key to increasing
public engagement and dramatically increasing the number of stakeholders who will support our
organizations.
41. 41
It's actually more than just collecting. Many community and regional archives do already, and I gather
that The National Archives here in the UK generally cannot collect personal materials. I would actually
argue that larger archives need to INTEGRATE what we currently think of as "personal archival material"
with institutional archival material. The two kinds of collections constitute two distinct, yet
codependent, ways of addressing the past.
42. 42
The challenge of merging personal and institutional is huge, perhaps even bigger than coping with the
turn towards digital. There's no way we can simply collect and display personal materials, mass media,
institutional and government records and call that the archives. We have to figure out how to merge the
collective and the personal, the macro- and micro-narrative. Ephemeral culture is like air -- it doesn't
stop at the institutional door. But I don't know how archives focused on collecting organizational and
official records can adapt to infinity; how they can collect and ingest personal records that challenge
not only archival workflow, but curatorship, cataloging, documentation, the integrity of a record. It is
very hard to tag a firehose.
43. Robert C, Binkley, Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials: A Survey
Made for the Joint Committee on Materials for Research of the Social Science
Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Ann Arbor: Edwards
Brothers, 1936.
43
It is hard to bring home feral cats. There is an unquantifiable prejudice among many
archivists against this kind of material; collecting it stretches Jenkinson's canonical definition
of an archives. Ultimately, as Robert Binkley said almost 80 years ago, this task will be one
for non-archivists.
44. RADIOPHONIC
WORKSHOP
44
A further suggestion: Make the archives a place of production, a place where films are made,
games coded, websites designed, books written, TV produced and transmitted. And, when
possible, look to archivists to do some of this work themselves. There's a longtime idea,
sometimes an ethic, that archivists and archives should not engage in research or production
themselves. But I think we could let the longtime antinomy between roles of archivist and
producer rest.
45. Text
45
Is it inevitable that archives simply serve makers whose work with our materials is done off
our premises? What can happen inside? We are seeing some bright spots.
-- labs, maker spaces, hacking history, making tools but also making products
-- this is where much of the technical innovation is occurring
46. 46
Touch. What if we generalized hospitality and touch as attributes of modern cultural repositories? Can
we bring nonprofessionals into the back to work with materials, annotate, repair, conserve, prepare for
scanning and remediate backlogs? We've done this with digital collections, but can we build what I'm
calling participatory physical archives?
47. 47
We did this in San Francisco for two years (explain results)
Explain SFPAG; fascination with physical materials; hands-on experience. Exchanging paraprofessional
archival training for analog film work that would otherwise go undone. Letting the public in the back,
not just in the gallery or research room.
Many good results, some disappointing ones.
-- THIS SUPPORTS LL (15 programs) and NMRT?
48. 48
Robert C. Binkley encouraged working with the public in 1936. And we might even say that he
predicted how the Internet ("the new techniques of reproduction") would add value to what
participating members of the public did. We can say this is impossible, or we can try to engineer ways
to make this possible. Let's let the public into the back of our archives, museums and libraries, and see
what happens.
50. Text
50
Archives may seem quiet, but archives are hot. Archives are the routers, the switching points
where past and present, and increasingly present and future, meet. In a time when words,
images, sounds and even richer media forms constantly combine in the media stream,
archives are strategic nodes in the evolving economy of knowledge and information
exchange.
51. Text
51
When I say "economy" I don't mean to say that information exchange is all based, or should be
based on "billable events." Much of it will happen in situations where no money changes
hands. But the pace of exchange is accelerating. We put our moving image collection online
beginning at the end of 2000, and now I barely go an hour online without seeing some new
manifestation of our images somewhere.
52. Text
52
Our collections and our work reverberates more loudly in the world as a consequence of
disintermediation. The absence of intermediaries, people in the middle. I call this
development the "new retail archives," but again, this isn't necessarily about selling. It means
that the public is accessing archival materials directly, instead of relying on other people to
make new works with archival records: simply watching TV programs that licensed archival
footage, buying books whose authors sought archival images,... etc. This is a novel
development for archives built around organizational rather than public service models. We
are now cultural producers. We can no longer take refuge from the masses who desire to use
our holdings.
53. 53
This pushes us into terribly ticklish situations. I personally believe history should be like
infrastructure, funded in the background (by taxes, for instance) rather than by user fees paid
by individuals. And while there are some exceptions, like stock image sales and perhaps
services like Ancestry.com, subscription and fee models for most archival use may not fly in
the long term. For new, we need to experiment with different models and see what works.
54. Text
54
Whether fee or free, it's time to push our holdings out to the maximum degree we can. We need an
historically conscious population. We need a more literate world filled with creators and larger
audiences for their work. We need the economic stimulus that cultural production provides, even if
we’re not capable of collecting and preserving everything that people and their institutions produce.
55. Easdale, Scotland, 2010
55
If we don’t open our doors, and we cannot find ways to act like cultural producers and push our
holdings out to the public for people to experience and to work with, we face a very uncertain future.
Demands for openness and participation are coming from all directions, and the price of rebuffing
them is obsolescence. Our users can help weave a stronger safety net.
Easdale, Scotland
56. The accessible archives:
Treats access as a key part of its mission, not an afterthought
Reconfigures its workflows to expand access and use
Limits access to collections only as required by law, respect, custom
and unavoidable constraint
Makes materials available before they're requested
Measures value by consumptive use
Collaborates with museums, libraries, nontraditional
institutions and individuals
Carefully assesses commercial partnerships
Seeks out new users
Brings archives into the community and community
into the archives
Sees archival activity as a civic function
Builds transactional spaces
Avoids being hobbled by the precautionary principle
56
How can our activities reverberate in the world? Principally this means making our collections more
accessible. What might an accessible archives look like? Here is a partial set of thoughts that's by no
means complete.
57. 57
A few years ago I was in Pittsburgh and met an archivist who was teaching cinema studies. She told
me she'd tried to get her students interested in archival questions, but couldn't. I asked why. She said
she thought it was because they saw archives as a dead end, the place where films went to die. This
was for me a great a-ha moment. I realized that so much of what I thought about archives could be
summed up very simply: the archives is not an endpoint, but a beginning.
58. 58
The idea that the archives is the point of origin, the birthplace of new work, is a simple idea, and yet it
expands out to change almost everything about the work that archivists do.
59. EXUBERANCE
59
We aspire to exuberance. Depending on your point of view, this might mean reframing
archives as cultural producers, as the publishers and broadcasters of the future. Or it might
mean universal access. Or it might mean enabling millions of authors, somewhat like the ill-
fated BBC Creative Archive sought to do.
60. A different day's work
60
But our legacy missions might limit our ability to evolve. The contours of our daily work imply a set of
choices that may not lead us where we would like to go. Workflows we most cherish may also be ruts
that we need to escape. And workflows often have social and political implications.
We need to problematize traditional practices. What needs to change?
61. photo: Bryan Boyce
Winning requires experiment
photo: Bryan Boyce
61
To speak American for a second, we can't hit home runs all the time. We need to be able to try and fail.
So I'd like to suggest a few experiments.
A few attributes of the exuberant archives.
63. 63
Could archivists do archival work like scientists engage in research? At the very least, could we open
ourselves to making experiments in preservation, access, documentation and transformation, rather
than repeating commonly accepted workflows time and again? And could we test our hypotheses
against reality as we perceive it? Can we infuse the arts & humanities with a sense of the scientific
method? For instance, what if we borrowed from environmental practice, and create an expectation that
we'd write preservation impact statements and access impact statements prior to undertaking new
projects? This might help us allocate scarce resources more diligently. [explain]
65. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
65
If my own experience is any guide, put it out or put it online, and people will come. Not only that, they
will add context and annotation to collections if given the chance.
67. 67
Every generation, every ethnic group, every new resident, every gender orientation, every region, every
degree of privilege or lack thereof should have the opportunity to review, rethink and recombine the
cultural heritage. It is a great privilege to teach a "Found Footage" class at UC Santa Cruz, where
almost 40% of the graduates are the first in their families to finish college. And diversity, as we know,
is an issue inside archives as well as outside. I know little about the UK situation, so won't comment.
69. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
69
To whom can we push material? Who needs it, and for what? We can learn this through experiment.
70. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
Address users one at a time
70
Create an intimate relationship with users. The mass media knows how to do that -- to target large
groups, but transmit the feeling that they are speaking directly to each individual.
Cultural institutions can appropriate mass media strategies. I'd hope we would do so critically, but after
all we too are cultural producers, just like the media.
71. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
Address users one at a time
Pay users to work with material
71
In fact, we already do this, with commissions, contests, residencies. I'm not being facetious when I
suggest that if our mission is to push historical and cultural materials out into a crowded and often
indifferent present, then it might be appropriate to find new ways of encouraging the use of our
material.
72. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
Address users one at a time
Pay users to work with material
Repository to workshop
72
Why do our users have to run away and make new works elsewhere? What kind of production, what
kind of making, can we bring in-house?
The archives might be a creative lab. A skunk works. An experimental farm. Can we induce the best of
the young makers to come, work with us, and make new works?
DIY, maker culture, steampunk. Fascination with physical objects. My 15 and 13-year-old nieces:
unabridged dictionary, typewriter, vinyl records.
THE ARCHIVES IS THE POINT OF ORIGIN AND REBIRTH.
73. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
Address users one at a time
Pay users to work with material
Repository to workshop
Rebirth traditional media experiences
73
The turn to digital revalidates the analog. But it is not quite the same as it was -- it's hybridized with
digital.
I make digital films that play before audiences who talk while they're playing. I thought this was a
radical move, until I realized what I was doing actually recalled old travel lectures from the late 19th
century, and the Elizabethan theater with the rowdies in front from much earlier. Hybridized analog
and digital. Digital technology often enables us to do traditional jobs better.
74. An exuberant archives
Research
Participation
Visible storage en masse
Diversity
Unite personal & institutional records
Identify new user groups
Address users one at a time
Pay users to work with material
Repository to workshop
Rebirth traditional media experiences
Wooden toy trains
74
And finally, remember electric trains? The best Christmas gift a kid could have. But you know what --
fewer and fewer kids play with electric trains. Wooden trains are back in vogue. As Raymond Williams
suggested, we are living in a culture where the emergent and residual interact. I take this to mean that
we cannot necessarily assume that the current fascination with tech tools and digitization is forever,
and that we might keep in mind a core tenet of conservatorship in mind -- engage in processes that
are reversible.
75. The objective of archival policy in a
democratic country cannot be the mere
saving of paper; it must be nothing less
than the enriching of the complete
historical consciousness of the people as
a whole...
— Robert C. Binkley, 1939
75
Most of us probably see ourselves as artisans and employees. I would counterpose the role of
citizen archivists. History, memory and cultural continuity are civic functions and that
archivists should think of themselves as citizens with civic responsibilities. This could mean
many things, but at minimum it indicates that archivists need to be advocates for their work
and their institutions in the public sphere. The term was recently appropriated in a different
sense by David Ferriero (FAIR-EE-OH), the new AOTUS, when he suggested that the archival
field should make more room for uncredentialed citizen volunteers. It created a little
controversy.
77. 77
Perhaps you prefer a quieter world. If so, I would ask you to consider that an inaccessible archives, a
dark archives will have a much harder time assuring its own survival.
79. Accidental artwork, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2007
79
A quiet archives isn't doing its work. An anxious archivist can't easily imagine her future course. But
the prospect of experiment can give us many reasons to be cheerful.
