Valerie Johnson

Size matters: The implications of volume for the digital archive of tomorrow – a case study from the UK national archives

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on a highly significant yet under-recognised concern: the huge growth in the volume of digital archival information and the implications of this shift for information professionals. Design/methodology/approach – Though data loss and format obsolescence are often considered to be the major threats to digital records, the problem of scale remains under-acknowledged. This paper discusses this issue, and the challenges it brings using a case study of a set of Second World War service records. Findings – TNA’s research has shown that it is possible to digitise large volumes of records to replace paper originals using rigorous procedures. Consequent benefits included being able to link across large data sets so that further records could be released. Practical implications – The authors will discuss whether the technical capability, plus space and cost savings will result in increased pressure to retain, and what this means in creating a feedback-loop of volume. Social implications – The work also has implications in terms of new definitions of the “original” archival record. There has been much debate on challenges to the definition of the archival record in the shift from paper to born-digital. The authors will discuss where this leaves the digitised “original” record. Originality/value – Large volumes of digitised and born-digital records are starting to arrive in records and archive stores, and the implications for retention are far wider than simply digital preservation. By sharing novel research into the practical implications of large-scale data retention, this paper showcases potential issues and some approaches to their management.

Research in the archival multiverse

Where to start? The first comment I received from anyone seeing me reading this book was about its size. This is a blockbuster of a book at over 1000 pages. So how to review it? The standard approa...

The Silence of the Archive.

The Silence of the Archive is a deceptively slim volume, for within its covers the reader discovers a wide-ranging, thought-provoking conversation that brings together fascinating examples and anecdotes from archival history and a variety of perspectives and insightful commentary, all arranged in a thematic exploration of the silences or absences in archives. The result is a timely contribution that succeeds in asking the big questions so necessary for the survival of archives in today’s world and bridging the gap in the archival literature between practical manuals and the contributions of archival theorists, historians, cultural theorists, and others about the archival endeavor. In considering what archives are not, the authors ironically bring us much closer to a grounded holistic understanding of what archives are, and what the role of archivists is, or should be.

Leading the historical enterprise: strategic creativity, planning, and advocacy of the digital age

‘archive pleasure’ and ‘physical, emotional and intellectual encounters’ and many writers acknowledge the role of archives in relation to people’s identity, memory and sense of place and their power to change lives.1 More research into the effect archives have had on users at a personal and emotional level might generate novel perceptions and provide valuable additional evidence when making the case for our services. There seems little doubt to this reviewer that the experiences and emotions that archives offer to people can be just as profound as any derived from works of art or other objects and activities.

A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State

about the professor who ‘complained, rather loudly’ and demanded to know if he was being viewed as ‘a thief’, when he found the door to be locked following the implementation, but presumably not the communication, of new security protocols (p. 7); or about the curator (p. 69) who took a position at another institution and cleaned out her office by dumping all of her papers ‘drawer by drawer . . . into trash cans’. The anecdote reminds me of an episode in John Kennedy Toole’s great comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans. The anti-hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, seeks to make his life easier by discarding most of the office files. With that action, Ignatius was regarded by the management of the company as having introduced a new dimension in office efficiencies. If, somehow, Ignatius had been afforded the opportunity to study Sidney Berger’s thoughts on retention schedules (pp. 70–71), surely he would not have been so cavalier.

The allure of the archives

This delight of a book is the English translation of a work first published in French as Le Gout de l’Archive in 1989, now reappearing in The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth Century Culture and History with a foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis. The author, Arlette Farge, is an historian with a reputation for exploring traces left in French official records, in particular interrogating criminal records from the French judiciary in order to reveal patterns of everyday life. This book is based exclusively on work at the judicial archives of the eighteenth century at the French library of the Arsenal and the National Library, and comprises five chapters interspersed with three vignettes. The chapters are in fact separate essays, but the whole works together as a set of observations on undertaking archival research. This is very much a user’s book, a book which sees archival research ‘as a dive, a submersion, perhaps even a drowning . . . you feel immersed in something vast, oceanic’ (p. 4). However, this archival research also produces ‘the sensation of having finally caught hold of the real’ (p. 8), and Farge’s first essay, ‘Traces by the thousands’, focuses on this access to the ‘real’. The reviewer was somewhat unconvinced by this initial claim of finding ‘reality’, as the police records of which Farge writes are as much a subjective mediation of a justice system which had its own needs and desires as other sources, something Farge goes on to acknowledge, emphasize and even celebrate. Her description of the archive as vast, for example, is not simply an observation on size or even the challenge of researching such huge sets of records. Instead, Farge uses this as a means to point out that historians cannot possibly read everything, and therefore to explore their inevitable ‘creation’ of one of many pasts via their enforced choice of what to read and to single out. However, one can understand Farge’s feeling of proximity to these lives, caught up in crime, which may not have wanted to be recorded. Farge further explores ideas of truth and reality in her second essay, ‘Paths and presences’, outlining her view that it ‘is no longer a question of whether a narration is factually accurate, but of understanding how it came to be articulated in the way that it was’ (p. 28). This is an important point, and one that lights a way forward in the sometimes sterile debate about objectivity and the archive. There is an interesting and strong discussion about women’s history, with Farge critical of histories that treat this subject in separate chapters or theses, removed from everyday existence, and how women’s role as embedded in life is clear in the archival evidence (pp. 34–35). Subtly, she outlines how the archive challenges historians, with contradictory readings: ‘if there is a “reality” that exists in these cases, it is in the plurality of ways of being and doing.’ Sometimes, this went too far for the current reviewer. Looking at acts of female violence and women’s ‘alleged enthusiasm for blood’, Farge concludes

Economies of representation, 1790–2000: colonialism and commerce

played a very important role in the formation of human capital in Spain, since this aspect matched their own interests: to improve the training of the family members destined to succeed the previous generation. To achieve this objective, family firms looked for support to the industrial engineering and commercial schools, consultancy firms and private business schools. In addition, the authors illustrate their research with the study of six cases selected among the great family firms to evidence how professionalisation has worked and advanced inside their management hierarchies. On the other hand, Domı́nguez underlines the role played by Spanish – Cantabric, to be specific – entrepreneurs in Mexican economy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, manifesting not only the traditional migrating flows from the Cantabric area but insisting as well on how diasporas benefit economic growth.