Heretical Archives: Heterotopic Institutions and Fictive Records

Archivaria, 2012

From the 1860s, Oxford colleges invited external scholars to catalogue their muniments. By looking at how eight colleges’ archives were arranged and described between 1860 and 1930, and by comparing them with the Dutch Manual and Jenkinson’s Manual , both published in this period, together with some earlier cataloguing work from eighteenth-century Oxford, this paper will show that a preoccupation not only with making the archives accessible but also with making particular records instantly available encouraged the archivists to ignore the provenance of records, breaking up fonds and organizing them according to chronology and subject matter rather than maintaining their original order. The consequence was that they treated the records in their care as discrete items, thus prejudicing content over context. The essay will also consider our own attitudes to archival management today, using a brief overview of government policies, archival theory, and online developments to suggest that...

Archival Science, 2009

Archives have the potential to change people's lives. They are created to enable the conduct of business and accountability, but they also support a democratic society's expectations for transparency and the protection of rights, they underpin citizen's rights and are the raw material of our history and memory. This paper examines these issues in the context of the historical development of archives and archivists in twentieth century England. The research lays the foundations for understanding how and why the modern archives and records management profession developed in England. This paper will investigate the historical conflict (or is it a continuum?) between archives as culture and as evidence. The story identifies and highlights the contributions made by many fascinating individuals who established archives services and professional practice in England in the twentieth century. They shaped the archive in a very real way, and their individual enthusiasms, interests and understandings set the course of the English archival profession. To a great extent, it was these individuals, rather than government or legislation, that set the boundaries of English archives, they decided what was included (acquired) and what was not (of archival value.) The conclusion will consider the more fundamental questions: what are archives and what are they for, or perhaps, 'what good are the archives'?

For Robert Brentano, Gene Brucker, and Natalie Zemon Davis-Masters of the Archives A lot of us have been concerned lately with theories and practices of authenticating the pasta reaction, among other things, to the stark choice between relativizing and essentializing dogmas that confront us, or are said to confront us, in the academy and even in real life. To such abstract certainties, my response has been to investigate how the authenticity of texts and artifacts has actually been established or invalidated, over time, by such fundamental authenticating institutions as the library, the museum, and the archives. These are repositories of record where evidentiary credentials are checked and claims to knowledge about the past are actually tested, not just talked about. For historical understanding, these repositories have become surrogates of God, and of the devil too. Archives have existed in one form or another since the beginnings of recorded history-they are one condition of having a historical record in the first place. But it is only since the nineteenth century that archives have been primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians, their equivalent of laboratories or fieldwork. Most historians still suffer professional rites of passage in the archives as ordained by Leopold von Ranke and the founding fathers of the modern discipline of history; nonarchival historians are likely to feel at least

Library & Information History, 2016

This article reports the results of a study of the private working library of an important French legal historian, François Olivier-Martin (1879-1952). It is demonstrated that a personal research library, being the reflection of the scholarly life, beliefs, and personality of its former owner, can be used as a source of information for historians and biographers. The article describes the process of intellectual reconstruction of the library to its original state and fills the existing gaps in the biographical information about Olivier-Martin, especially regarding his life and work during the Vichy period. keywords private libraries, book collectors, book collecting, legal historians, book history, François Olivier-Martin, Vichy François Mauriac famously said, '"Dis-moi ce que tu lis, je te dirai qui tu es" il est vrai, mais je te connaîtrai mieux si tu me dis ce que tu relis'  ('"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread'). In recent years, studies of private libraries and collections-some more analytical in nature, some in the form of annotated bibliographies-have been undertaken with a varying, but ever-present, attention paid to the connection between the personality and life of its former owner and the books constituting their private library.  These studies demonstrate that a private library, a private collection, or a personal research library can be regarded as a reflection of the life, personality, or character of its former owner and collector. Roger Chartier talks about the difficult task of historians striving to understand the 'suffering and hopes, rational decisions and extravagant dreams' of men and women of the past but often facing 'only silences, silences of those who never wrote'.  Filling this gap, private book collections and personal research libraries can become inaudible but no less real voices of their former owners and collectors and be used as material evidence to complement information about their lives and work available in other sources or even to act as such in their absence, allowing historians to 'listen to the dead with their eyes'. 

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida traces the root meaning of the term archive connecting it to the "archons" and suggesting that official documents exist in a state of "domiciliation" in a form of "house arrest" which marks the "institutional passage from the private to the public." In his 2006 essay, "How to Remember?" Ciaran Carson states that "Memory plays tricks. Any time a shard of memory comes to light, whether dug up or stumbled upon, it is altered by the act of remembering." Carson suggests that we can, of course, refer to the archive, to "ephemera," however, "these too are open to interpretation" and that one can "doubt their authenticity, or raise questions as to their selectivity." Ricouer suggests that humanity has "an ethical duty to remember" connecting memory with the ethical project of being faithful to the past and the "truth" of the past as much as is possible in any reconstruction of historical events. Using both Carson's questioning of the validity of the archive and Derrida's exploration of the archive, I aim to illustrate the ways in which the archive or the idea of the archive operates in Ciaran Carson's work and in the construct of specific archival holdings in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Inherent in this exploration is a broader exploration of the structure of the modern Archive and the ways in which archival choices might work to structure a particular form of Irish identity.

Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices

This chapter uses the Wellcome Library's archive collecting around the treatment and experience of ‘mad people’ as a case study for exploring the opportunities and challenges that arise from mainstream attempts to introduce counter-narratives into the archive. The argument laid out in this chapter is based on observations at the Wellcome Library. It uses an auto-ethnographic approach, combined with in-depth interviews with Special Collections staff, to seek to understand perceptions and practice around collection development. In seeking to understand the representation of the treatment and experience of ‘mad people’ within the archives and manuscripts collections held by the Wellcome Library, the chapter focuses on madness from the 19th century to the present. It reveals that the most dominant and prevailing archival collection strength across this time period is focused on personal papers of eminent ‘psy’ experts (psychiatric specialists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, and rela...

Archives, 2008

Archivaria, 2001

Archives in a Wider World: The Culture and Politics of Archives * SARAH TYACKE RÉSUMÉ L'auteure propose ici une réflexion sur quelques questions que soulèvent la culture, la critique littéraire, l'histoire et le post-modernisme pour la gestion des documents, les archives et les archivistes, d'un point de vue britannique. Cet essai se fonde sur les changements observés, au cours des dix dernières années, dans la place des archives telle que perçue dans différents pays. L'auteure soutient que les archivistes ont le rôle majeur de résoudre les tensions sociales contemporaines concernant ce qu'il faut conserver et détruire et ce qu'il convient d'ouvrir ou de restreindre, que ce soit pour le présent ou, plus important encore, pour les générations futures. Les archivistes doivent expliquer de façon claire les fondements de leurs décisions et comprendre les biais inhérents qui les sous-tendent. ABSTRACT This is a reflective essay on some of the cultural, literary criticism, historical, and postmodern implications for records management and archiving, archives, and archivists from a point of view situated in the United Kingdom. It is based on observing the changes, over the past ten years, in the position of archives in various countries' perceptions. The author maintains that archivists have the critical role of producing an archiving resolution of the tensions in society at any one time between what should be kept and destroyed, and what should be open and closed-both for the present and, more importantly, for future generations. Archivists need to make the manner of the archival resolution clear and understand the inherent biases in the processes necessary to achieve that resolution. * This is a revised version of an unrefereed article for a Festchrift. I am indebted to discussions I have had with Michael Moss, Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, and Ian Willison. In particular, they have improved my own slender knowledge of the battleground between postmodernists (or at least some) and other historians (or at least some) and drawn my attention to the work of Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, 2d ed. (London, 1997).

(Un)contested Heritage: Archives, Museums and Public places, 2023

History Workshop Journal, 2007