n.all actions relating to the selection and care of records of enduring valueTrever 1945b, 167Miss Jeanne Wier, secretary of the Nevada State Historical Society writes that “we are concentrating all our energies during this Legislative session on getting a building and I think we have an excellent chance of success. Until we have more room it is useless to talk of getting further legislation enacted toward a better archiving system.”Plavchan 1979, 230International Conference on “Data Archiving.” The Canadian Secretariat of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST) is sponsoring a conference in Ottawa, scheduled for 7–10 May 1979. IASSIST, formed in 1975, is an international association of individuals who manage, operate, or utilize machine-readable data archives, data libraries, and program libraries concerning social sciences. It consists of several secretariats (Asian, Canadian, East and West European, South and Central American, and United States) with an overall steering committee. IASSIST has established seven “action groups” to grapple with the problems related to acquisition, classification, distribution, preservation, processing, production, and utilization of machine-readable data of interest to social scientists and other researchers. The theme of the Ottawa conference is to be “Data Archiving: Models for International Cooperation.”Simmons 1983, 3Integral to the notion of proper archival management of records, and especially those which require decision making, is the necessity to demonstrate a pattern of practice which shows care and concern. It will be important for the profession to document practice and to share that documentation, for archiving, like the writing of history, is a collective enterprise.Hodge 2000In addition, there are several key practices involving the creator that are evolving within the archiving projects. First, the creator may be involved in assessing the long-term value of the information.Nesmith 2002, 27Conventional ideas about archiving reflect and reinforce this view. Archivists not only attempt to acquire primary (or original) sources, or records, which are thus thought to have special (even unique) integrity as means of access to the past; they believe that providing information about the records’ origin and respecting the original order of their creation are essential to ensure that archiving is a neutral means of communication of the recorded past.Cunningham 2008, 531Just as archiving (the management of archives and records) is but one form of curation, so too is digital archiving just one form of digital curation. Yet the two terms are so often used interchangeably as to appear to be synonymous. They are not.Velios 2011, 259Having read these writings mentioned above, and in an attempt to digest the underlying concepts and their applicability to archival practice, there is one final important observation to be made: most of the theoretical discourse on archiving seems to focus on a single point of power of the archivist, which is the process of selection. This is undoubtedly a critical point in the archivist’s work and it seems to be the main concern in the field, which perhaps overshadows the role of the archivist as an expert in arrangement and description.Becker and Nogues 2012, 483To investigate how emerging and established writers are archiving their work, as well as how their personal archiving practices influence what they write, how they write, and how they conceptualize their bodies of work, we conducted an anonymous, online survey of 110 poets, essayists, and fiction writers in 2011.the storage and preservation of records of enduring valueCrane 1977, 77It also makes a valid appeal for rooting out, rerecording, and archiving all the old masters (it claims that fewer than 10 percent of the 47,000 vocal recordings known to have been made are filed in any way which allows for systematic retrieval), and placing them in libraries to assure the public this much of their heritage: that anything recorded for posterity will in fact become the property of posterity.Hommell 1982, 199And finally, every precaution to assist future scholars has been taken, including the archiving of the project’s own records (Entry 398, University of Illinois).Msiska 1987, 142This money was to be used for purchasing a wide range of equipment—tapes, tape recorders, projector, microphones, and headphones. Whereas some of this equipment was intended to be loaned to bona fide researchers, other equipment was supposed to facilitate transcribing and archiving completed oral history projects in the library.Wallot 1994, 383Like NARA, the National Archives of Canada (NAC) has the legislative mandate to preserve the corporate memory of the federal government through sound information management, destruction of records without enduring value (more than 95% of the whole); archiving and making available, after proper appraisal, the best records that document the “acts and deeds” of the government, its transactions within and without, and its relationships with the citizens.Connelly and Immerman 2015While archiving email presents a technical challenge to the federal government, the Obama administration, to its credit, has ordered that all electronic records be managed digitally by 2019, including records that, in the past, departments would have printed out before sending to the National Archives and Records Administration.Ernst 2015, 54Censorship is the surest guarantee of archiving (and the inquisitorial collection of personal data is the dispositif of literary genres like fiction and biography). Were it not for the numerous censors’ files containing descriptions of each movie set, in accordance with the logic of police tradition, our knowledge of early film—given the loss of much of the film stock—would be deplorably small.Computingthe offline storage of data from an information system when that data is no longer required for active useErnst 2015, 29Thinking about the archive cybernetically doesn’t necessarily explain it as a universal metaphor for every form of storage, which currently grows at an inflationary rate: here the term archiving has nothing to do with archiving it its classic sense but rather merely denotes data storage.
Notes
Some archivists avoid the use of the term archiving, possibly in the belief that the word is one that was used first by computer scientists and that is currently used in an archives sense only by an uninformed public. However, archivists were likely the first to use the term, and that use began no later than the 1940s, though use of the term increased dramatically in the 1990s, based probably on the popularity of the term in the information technology field. The term is used in archivy in two different senses: one encompassing all of the work of an archives that is focused on records, and the other focused merely on the storage and preservation of those records, that latter use again likely influenced by the computing use of the term.
