Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

437 Pages·2008·2.494 MB·English

by  Richard J. Cox

Personal Archives
and a New Archival Calling

Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

Personal Archives
and a New Archival Calling

Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

By

Richard J. Cox

Litwin Books, LLC
Duluth, Minnesota
Copyright 2008 Richard J. Cox

Published in 2008

Litwin Books, LLC
PO Box 3320
Duluth, MN 55803

http://litwinbooks.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-0-9802004-7-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cox, Richard J.
Personal archives and a new archival calling : readings, reflections and
ruminations / by Richard J. Cox.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary: "Examines issues affecting the future of personal and family
archives, from the point of view of archival science"--Provided by
publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9802004-7-8 (alk. paper)
1. Personal archives--Management. 2. Family archives--Management.
3. Records--Management. 4. Electronic records--Management. 5.
Archives--Philosophy. 6. Archives--Social aspects. I. Title.
CD977.C68 2008
025.1'97--dc22
2008045503
Table of Contents

Introduction vii.
Chapter One Posting Notes and, Then, Saving Them 1.

Chapter Two The Romance of the Document 35.
Chapter Three Information Documents: How People and 65.
Organizations Acquire Information

Chapter Four A “Therapeutic Function”: Personal 107.
Recordkeeping

Chapter Five Human Impulses and Personal Archives 137.
Chapter Six Traces of Ourselves: More thoughts on 167.
Personal Recordkeeping and the Roles of
Archivists

Chapter Seven Electronic Mail and Personal 201.
Recordkeeping

Chapter Eight The Web of Records: The World Wide 243.
Web, the Records Professions, and Personal
Archiving

Conclusion 289.
Works Cited 313.
Endnotes 355.
Index 405.

Introduction

As this book argues, personal archives might be assuming a new
importance in society as the technical means for creating, maintaining,
and using documents improve and become more cost-effective, and, as
individuals and families also seek to preserve their old documents,
especially traditional paper forms, as a connection to a past that may
seem to be in risk of being swallowed up in the immense digital gadgetry
in our Internet Age. There is a reversal to older technologies as well,
such as leather bound journals and fountain pens, by some individuals
resisting or protesting the increasingly digital world they reside in.
Behind these very different approaches are similar impulses, and, these
divergent paths raise identical questions about the role and purpose of
traditional archives dating back two centuries and more. Personal
recordkeeping raises a remarkable array of issues and concerns about
records and their preservation, public or collective memory, the mission
of professional records managers and archivists, the nature of the role of
the institutional archives, and the function of the individual citizen as
their own archivist. Archivists need to develop a new partnership with
the public, and the public needs to learn from archivists the essentials of
preserving documentary materials. We are on the cusp of seeing a new
kind of archival future, and whether this is good or bad depends on how
well archivists equip citizen archivists.
What follows are a heavily revised and expanded set of essays
originally written over the past few years about personal recordkeeping
for the Records & Information Management Report, as well as reviews of
relevant studies and reports originally posted on my blog, “Reading
Archives.” In these essays I try to capture something of the changes
underway in how individuals create personal and family records, and I
provide some assessment of whether these changes are so substantial
that they require the archival profession to re-examine how they
approach the preservation and promote the use of such historical
documents. Christine Harold argues that our lives are shaped by the
intensive hyperactive media surrounding us, believing that
our public rhythms are shaped and punctuated by an endless systolic
and diastolic pulsing of newspapers, Hollywood films, twenty-four news
channels, sitcoms, movies of the week, banner ads, billboards, reality
television, presidential debates, novels, fashion magazines, hip-hop
viii PERSONAL ARCHIVES

videos, porn, blogs, talk radio, bumper stickers, anime, political smear
campaigns – the texts of everyday life that constitute the teeming and
multicitational field in which publics are made.1
Some of these, such as blogs, also relate to how people can produce new
documentary forms, but most of these are documentary forms that
might be collected in order to help us mark our own lives. In a
discussion about the new nature of memory, Joshua Foer states that
Over the past millennium, many of us have undergone a profound
shift. We’ve gradually replaced our internal memory with what
psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast superstructure of
technological crutches that we’ve invented so that we don’t have to
store information in our brains. We’ve gone, you might say, from
remembering everything to remembering awfully little. We have
photographs to record our experiences, calendars to keep track of our
schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store our collective
knowledge, and Post-It notes for our scribbles. What have the
implications of this outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for
our society? Has something been lost?2
When one reads a description such as this, it is relatively easy to
envision archives (along with museums and libraries) and the roles these
institutions play to preserve such materials so that there can be a
societal memory. However, the new challenge may be that many of the
newer digital versions of such documents may be impossible to maintain
in an archives, at least as has been traditionally thought of, and may be
shifting more and more to be the responsibility of the records creator –
and these records creators need a new kind of assistance. Archivists
need to help individuals maintain personal and family archives, only
collecting those of special or extraordinary significance when they are
endangered.
In the first chapter, “Posting Notes and Then Saving Them,” I set
the stage for why we may need to think about the preservation of family
and personal archives in new ways. Although a visit to any bookstore
will suggest that Americans are a people addicted to self-help
publications, we will find few such volumes that provide reasonable
advice about personal archiving or recordkeeping. Why is this when we
know that we follow many impulses to save old documents, especially
those connected with ourselves or our families. Some of these impulses
have been altered, even enhanced, by elements of our own digital era.
More important, however, might be the contrast between old style
INTRODUCTION ix

institutional collectors (like historical societies) and the changing nature
of what can be collected (or maybe not collected) in our own increasing
reliance on digital documents and objects. Many of the records being
acquired by these institutions are actually the product of personal and
family efforts to gather, organize, and maintain their documents.
Individuals, in whatever era, have nonetheless administered their own
records in interesting and sometime creative ways, as the life of the
eighteenth century figure Jonathan Edwards and Ben Schneiderman’s
use of Leonardo da Vinci as an inspiration for administering digital
documents demonstrate. Indeed, one thing that has not changed is the
interest in maintaining one’s place in the world by remembering,
through archives and artifacts, where one has come from. Some have
characterized our present information era as also an age of forgetfulness
because there is far too much information for us to handle and digest.
The value of personal and family archives may be on the rise – but how
will we be able to save them?
The second chapter, describing recent research and reflection about
certain personal documents – the journal, letter, oral messages, and the
Web page – suggests that there is a romanticized notion about each of
these documentary forms that continues to pull us into using them; the
heart of this chapter was originally published as “The Romance of the
Document,” Records & Information Management Report 22 (January 2006):
1-13. While predictions about Americans’ loss of interest in the past and
their general rootlessness grow, they continue to scour flea markets,
antique stores, museums, libraries, and historic sites. And, while on their
quests, these individuals are often searching for letters, diaries, and
other such documents, all while they are continuing to generate these
traditional forms of records. People are interested in touching the past
and, it seems, contributing to it in the form of generating new
documents. They like the stories they extract from old family records,
and they are utilizing Web sites to create new personal and family
albums in ways far more public than anything we have seen before.
Whether on aging paper or the most sophisticated digital repository,
there continues to be a lure of the document. It is the romance of the
document that encourages individuals to maintain personal and family
archives, and, in some instances, to turn these over to archival
repositories. Of course, in these repositories, many archivists are there
because they long ago heard the call of the document.
The third chapter considers how people acquire information, and it
is based on a lengthy review essay considering the three-volume work of