n.the burden on archival workers and repositories resulting from previous decisions and practicesTU Libraries 2022The panel examined methods for transcending the profession’s unresolved legacies of harm and proposed forgiving our ‘archival debt’ so that archivist’s [sic] may actively choose relief, awaken community-centered care, and instill intentionality into archival practice.Cuellar et al. 2023, 1However, while their article homes in on how technical debt is accrued in digital collections work, and more broadly, in collection management work, our conception and consideration of archival debt speaks to a profession-wide liability, one that all archivists are accountable for regardless of our functional role. Archival debt signifies resources owed to address problematic legacy issues in an archival repository resulting from past practices, policies, and strategies that prioritized the protection and validation of institutions over democratic access and responsible stewardship. As a concept, archival debt amalgamates the myriad issues we now grapple with as a profession, including harmful or inadequate description, performative or competitive collecting, languishing backlogs, failure to recognize staff potential, shortsighted fund management, neglected constituencies, a lack of documentation, and poor project management.Cuellar et al. 2023, 10As a director now, what I see as the most visible impact of archival debt is the time that my colleagues and I spend on corrective measures, like tracking down missing boxes, trying to build relationships with communities who may have good reasons to not trust us, or trying to understand decisions that were made when there are no paper trails that document procedures, policies, or workflows.Cuellar et al. 2023, 11In my career, I’ve encountered archival debt in many shapes and forms, but a foundational and longstanding form that I’ve grappled with has been that of hidden collections and silenced voices—specific instances include backlogs of unprocessed collections, inaccurate or insufficient description, harmful legacy practices of collecting and stewarding materials, and a growing awareness of the unintended consequences and potentially harmful impact of the action-oriented and data-driven solutions that I was part of implementing to eliminate the backlog.Cuellar et al. 2023, 12As I’ve progressed in my career as a leader and administrator, I now view archival debt as: an indicator of misalignment (between commitments made and honored, between intention and action); a symptom of imbalance (between resources and demands, between decisions and actions at different points of archival lifecycle); as a structural and cultural issue rather than merely a technical one; as a collective responsibility in which we all have a role to play; and ultimately as a polarity (one of many “wicked issues,” paradoxes, conundrums) to be managed and navigated with intention and care, rather than a problem to be solved.Arnold 2023Everyone who’s worked as an archivist has experience [sic] this debt in one form or another, and the panelists (their comments were recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies) argued that, as a profession we are being crushed by this debt and need to find ways to forgive it rather than continue to attempt to negotiate with it. ¶ I’m finding this particularly poignant right now as I wrestle with past ideas or decisions that seemed so great at the time but have over time become ineffective or changed beyond recognition. If we’re going to forgive archival debt, we’ve got to be able to forgive ourselves, and that starts with the humility to admit that we make mistakes, as well as the will to move past that failure and try again. This is especially true for those of us in leadership positions in archives.Dickerson and Eagle Yun 2024, 2033A social justice imperative in archives—elevating the voices and expertise of those (mis)represented, maligned, or otherwise marginalized in the historical record—does not serve the purposes of objective, structured, all-knowing, complete data. In this way, the pluralized archival paradigm and the centering of representational belonging become relegated to the margins of archivy, irreconcilable with the essentialization required of structured, computational archives. We must always be willing to release the archival debt levied upon those of us who steward the material of memory.Libby 2024In my collection, there is so much reappraisal and reprocessing that needs to be done before we can even start to think about the normal barriers of digitization. It depends on the level of archival debt that you have in your collection, and we’re in arrears. We work toward what we envision for the archives, pivoting from previous decisions, policies, and practices established when the archives wasn’t run by information professionals, but by historians, who had a different set of priorities.
