adj.relating to or being responsible for the care and oversight of recordsLeland 1950, 115I think a conservative claim may be made for this First Conference of Archivists that it marked the formal and conscious recognition of the administration of archives as a distinct profession similar to other custodial professions, but differing from them in demands and qualifications.Ham 1975, 7Small wonder the custodial image is still widely held by our allies in the research community. Indeed, the persistence of the custodial tradition has not only been a major factor in the archivist's failure to deal with acquisition policy on a coherent and comprehensive basis, but has resulted in an obsession—with the “nuts and bolts” or craft aspects of our work.Reingold 1983, 21I am particularly anxious that institutions holding significant bodies of archival and personal papers do both. I do not believe that archives, libraries, and historical societies should act merely as passive custodial institutions.Garrison 1989, 24When academic winds shifted in the late 1960s, tillers in the vineyard of the “new history,” which focused on previously ignored minority groups and the quasi-mythical “common people,” discovered and often loudly criticized the biases and gaps in the documentary record assembled during the era of custodial passivity.Baker 1997, 250Archives will continue to acquire records, paper-based and electronic, and carry out custodial functions; at the same time, the number of archival records series retained and preserved by their creators is likely to increase rapidly.Henry 1998, 313They argued that archivists should change their focus, from the content of a record to its context; from the record itself to the function of the record; from an archival role in custodial preservation and access to a nonarchival role of intervening in the records creation process and managing the behavior of creators.Cunningham 1999, 57While distributed custody may be fine for government records, the transitory nature of personal records creators means that, in Australia, personal records archivists have little choice but to confront the custodial challenge if they are to preserve and provide access to important personal records created in electronic form.Bastian 2001, 97The transfer initiated a series of archival events in which competing custodial claims for the archival records of the islands resulted in the loss of access to them by the community in which they were created. Custody claims by both the United States and Denmark not only caused fragmentation of the records but denied Virgin Islanders access to their collective memory.Cook 2011a, 626More optimistically, another group of archivists is calling for a complete reinvention of archives to acknowledge that these are contingent places of power and agency that need new concepts and models to transform them—from modernist to postmodernist, from passive custodial to active interventionist, from hierarchical and exclusionary to networked and inclusive, from inward-looking and secretive to openly transparent and interactive, from dealing at the micro level with impossible volumes of individual documents to making archival decisions at the macro level of the records’ context and functionality, thus moving the focus for archival activities from records as artifactual products to the complex processes of record making.Gilliland 2014a, 123The Archivists’ Workbench, however, was predicated upon a custodial model for electronic records, while today many repositories are investigating collaborative preservation repositories or completely noncustodial models, thus raising a question about whether the workbench approach could work if electronic records were never physically removed from the recordkeeping environment in which they were created.
