n.the importance that accrues to records because of their cultural, social, and psychological significance to a societyO’Toole 1993, 249–250The more purely historical meaning of the Domesday Book emerged gradually, and in that it achieved an unrivaled symbolic value. Not just any primary source, it was so comprehensive and so ancient that it came to occupy a central psychological position, even when it was cited in support of patently ridiculous assertions.Bearman 1995, 394–395Imagine the effort involved in preserving the only copy of an important record such as the Declaration of Independence. Is this effort undertaken to satisfy an archival objective? Granted, the original has symbolic value, but what evidence is lost if tens of thousands of copies of the Declaration of Independence are in wide circulation and there is no chance that the destruction of any one of them will have a significant impact on the availability of evidence of this critical transaction? Is copying records a preservation strategy that is potentially more robust than preserving unique originals?Cox 1996, 510, fn. 12Gioia gets to the heart of why manuscripts, even those with questionable or unknown value, are acquired by institutions. The author dismisses the market setting values, examines what insights literary manuscripts can provide into the work of a particular author, and then contends that such materials are being collected because of reasons having to do with their symbolic value in a technocratic age.Sickinger 1999, 230Not only were fewer Athenians able to read or write than earlier scholars had assumed, written documents were also used in ways alien to modern conceptions of the written word as a practical tool for conveying and preserving information. The Athenians, it is argued, utilized written texts less for administrative purposes than for their symbolic value, and apart from inscriptions on stone, most documents were ephemeral. Long-term preservation was limited, and archival texts were seldom consulted.Nesmith 2002, 32–33Similar examples abound. Arthur Doughty, Brymner’s successor as head of the Canadian archives from 1902 to 1935 (and who was, if anything, even more dynamic in building it than Brymner) spoke of the indispensable contribution of archives to “civilization” itself—as do many Canadian archivists today—when they cite his statement: “Of all national assets, archives are the most precious; they are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.” This high symbolic value of archives is also reflected in the location of the American National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) at the center of American civic life in the nation’s capital city.Daniel 2010, 92Before turning to this new model, it is useful to mention a second implication of postmodernism for the study of ethnic archives. Postmodernist ideas have helped fuel a growing literature on the symbolic value of records and the symbolic role of archives in identity formation and the shaping of collective memory.Conway 2010, 437The value of an image is also seen to reside in the emotions that the image elicits from the viewer. Digitized archival photographs, transmitted seamlessly from archive to home or office, have a particularly strong emotional power that text-based records often lack, even those with intense symbolic value.Hughes 2014, 271Because Cox saw the evidence function as preceding any social or cultural value, he argued that archivists can attend to evidence, and cultural and symbolic value will take care of themselves—as “a kind of added-on value.”
