adj.relating to the concept in archives of the absence of bias from influences such as politics, identity, power, culture, or other factorsLamoree 1995, 149Lack of knowledge and the fear of being tainted with the brush of controversy often seem to override a repository’s potential interest in documenting a conflict. Knowledge can be obtained only through experience; a repository or archivist embarking on documenting a controversy should indeed proceed with caution. Nonetheless, most, if not all, potential problems can be avoided by a careful and thoughtful approach to collecting. The key to success lies in a strategy for documenting an issue rather than a side, group, or individual. Other essential points are always to present a neutral, objective, professional image; to constantly reiterate the fact that the repository's program and personnel are neutral, fair, and evenhanded; to provide a forum in which everyone with an axe to grind may talk with the archivist as part of a local documentation project; to know the issue and the participants to the extent that the archivist can anticipate their reactions; to have the right staff; and, finally, to have the right timing.Sturgeon 1996, 35The authors argue that cultural institutions can no longer claim to be neutral in the debate over cultural values. These values, which museums (and archives) help to shape, and are in turn shaped by, are reflected in the type and nature of the artifacts they collect, artifacts which are given the cultural blessing of being deemed “significant” and hence worthy of preservation.Armstrong-Ingram 1997, 33It is important that archivists, while acknowledging that they are restrained by current law, neither go beyond the restrictions imposed by that law or refrain from a duty to inform the debate on the issues regarding the general principles involved rather than allow it to be fueled by sentimental stereotypes. Records are not simply neutral witnesses. They incorporate the ideology that infused the processes that resulted in their creation. The status of records needs to be reconsidered periodically as social ideology changes.Blouin 1999, 102What is our past and how do we know it? For many generations this question was limited by a consensus on the role and authority of archival documentation in determining the “truth” of the past. Now this authority is being questioned by scholars in many disciplines who find in the archives not a neutral party, but rather forces complicit with dominant cultural and political aims as defined by evolving attitudes within constructs of the nation-state. The representations in the archives and the absences in the archives, rather than being the result of random deposits in the life cycle of records, may be purposeful in selectivity and in the architecture of the evidentiary and informational content.Greene 2003, 101As archivists, we frequently straddle the divide—if there truly is one—between history and memory, and we have comforted ourselves with the notion that we are guardians or purveyors of the neutral informational objects that are used or misused by both historians and community members.Johnson, E., 2008, 192The lively discussion that followed this presentation did not concern the radical nature of Zinn’s politics or the content of the existing historical record; rather, the discussion focused on the “controversial question of the archivist as a ‘collector’ of documentary materials.” Archivists had always seen their role as that of neutral caretakers and custodians of records, not as “activist” collectors who consciously solicited records to shape the content of their collections.Cook 2013, 101–102The resulting need for the archivist to research and understand the complex nature of the functions, structures, processes, and related contexts of creation and contemporary use of records, and to interpret their relative importance as the basis for modern archival appraisal (and for all subsequent archival functions), undermined the traditional notion of the impartiality of the archivist as neutral guardian or objective keeper of evidence. More recently, archivists’ growing involvement “up front” in computer system design, to ensure that the properties of reliable evidence will exist for the most important electronic records, represents a similar mediative role. Archivists inevitably will inject their own values, experiences, and education, and reflect those of various external pressures, into all such research and decision-making.Duff and Haskell 2015, 52Archivists’ aversion to decentralized control may derive from primary duty and obligation to preserve the authenticity and integrity of records, which the profession has traditionally linked to bureaucratic control and neutral custodianship of records.Ramirez 2015, 343A state of being generally invisible to those who inhabit it, whiteness as the “neutral” ground upon which racial difference and exclusion are determined benefits from this unquestioned status as the ultimate point of reference for normativity. Ubiquitous in its inconspicuousness, whiteness, as Lipsitz affirmed, is nevertheless omnipresent to nonwhites who are subject to its standards.Matheny 2019, 486In 2008, Doris Malkmus noted that much effort was being spent in making materials more accessible, while archival instruction was “perfunctory,” still geared toward tool use rather than the development of research skills. The next year, Peter Carini offered a potential reason for this: not only were archivists not trained as teachers, they were only beginning to change their conception of themselves as “neutral gatekeepers” of materials who should not be helping users shape their research.Quagliaroli and Casey 2021, 389In all her archival research instruction sessions, Casey’s goal is to demystify archives for the students, both in terms of “the archive” as a place for research and “archives” as collections created by a person, state, or corporate entity, and thus never neutral.Sanbein 2026, 10Socio-technical scholarship demonstrates that organisational routines are mediated and shaped by technological artefacts (Leonardi 2011; Orlikowski 2000). Information systems are not neutral tools but active participants in structuring action, enabling certain practices while constraining others.
