America's Next Top Information Professional

In LIBR 559M, we’ve had some interesting discussions about the  “archiving” of web materials, particularly things like Tweets. Dean pointed us to a thought-provoking piece in the Journal of the Society of Archivists, an exploration of the role of the National Archives in the 21st century. It raises some interesting points, but I was taken aback by this statement: “Jenkinson described archives in terms defined only by their content, not their purpose.” Am I misunderstanding this? Jenkinson defined as the natural residue of some activity: that is, you don’t make a record just in order to make a record. Which means he cared about the purpose of the record (the activity that created it) rather than the content (whatever information was in it).

Anyway, I bring this up, because like many in the ‘chival community, I cringe a bit at the use of the word “archiving” as a verb. The application of this term to just any old data also obscures the key fact that not everything that you archive is archival. That is, not every bit of information is a record, and not all of those records are bound for the archives anyway. I stick with Jenkinson on this one: a record is a document that was created or received and kept in the process of doing business.

That being said, in a way, the use of “archiving” is a flattering reminder of the importance of the work we do to preserve materials for future access. And, it’s important to admit that plenty of archives include non-record materials in their holdings. Realia, books, pamphlets, newspapers: all these things end up in archives. Why? Because they inform our identity and memory, maybe they

In this same issue of the Journal, there’s a lovely presidential address by Victor Gray titled ” ‘Who’s that Knocking on Our Door?’: Archives, Outreach and Community.” The UK has made some amazing initiatives in community archives which seek to empower communities to collect and preserve their own histories. These may or may not be records in the Jenkinsonian sense, the communities may keep the archives permanently, pass them along to a public institution, or simply disband the collection after time. Their definition of community archives is fascinating:

Broadly speaking, people think of projects as community archives either because:

1. The subject-matter of the collection is a community of people. The classic example is a group of people who live in the same location, but there are ‘communities of interest’ as well, such as people who worked in a certain profession.
2. The process of creating the collection has involved the community. Typically, this means that volunteers have played a key role, sometimes alongside professional archivists.

The point of these initiatives is not to force the public to swallow archival theory, but simply to celebrate and support community identity and memory. And, in a roundabout way, this is the sense in which I hope we find a way to “archive” our Tweets. We don’t need to keep them because they are records, but because they help inform our understanding of our community and our time.