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Summary

Introduction

Many natives of St Kitts have claimed that they do not care about the past because there is nothing in it that is worth remembering. The complexities of the relationship of post-colonial societies and their history have often had an impact on the way archives are viewed. Kittitian researchers approach them with a sense of awe, that something so old has survived while others call them ‘white people archives’ and refuse to use them. The statement is a rejection of the archives of the colonizer and a yearning for what is not there – an archive of the colonized. Trouillot writes, ‘Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing. Something is always left out while something else is recorded’ (Trouillot, 1995, 49). Since power and the ability to create archives rested with the island's elite, the records naturally reflect the events they felt were important. As a consequence records are often obstacles that hide and distort significant elements of the history of the colonized (Bastian, 2006, 267). Accounts of visitors to St Kitts and the Caribbean speak of the cheerful singing of the field gangs, but there was nothing enjoyable about the cane fields. The songs, often protests or prayers, were a tool, developed in Africa, to co-ordinate team effort in agricultural activities (Abrahams and Szwed, 1983, 46). By recognizing that the archive was an inherent part of the machinery of colonialism, one becomes conscious of its limitations in contributing to the history of the colonized in a post-colonial community and yet it is still a source of information about them.

For the Kittitian community the ‘daily recounting’ (Connerton, 1989, 17) or gossip of village life gives rise to a history that is immediate, accessible and appealing to a people whose roots had been severed and who were governed by an alien elite. However in government and in organizations, reliance on memory places severe limitations on decision making. The administration of self-governing St Kitts had to learn the importance of records quickly and almost entirely without assistance. Convincing the rank and file of the civil service to comply with this need required training and the nurturing of a new culture that was inconsistent with what existed in the villages. Without this change, Kittitians stand the risk of silencing themselves.

Summary

[Editor's note: In August 2008, the Fourth Annual Conference on the History of Records and Archives (ICHORA IV) was held in Perth, Australia. The theme of the conference was ‘Minority Reports: indigenous and community voices in archives’. The following keynote address by Glen Kelly is reproduced, with some minor editing, in its entirety.]

Introduction

First of all, let me acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this place, the Whadjuk Noongars. This isn't something that I say f lippantly; my family are Traditional Owners in the lower south west of the state. I am a Wardandi Noongar, so I make that acknowledgement as an outsider, to state that I recognize the primacy of the Whadjuk Noongars in this country and to pay my respect to these people.

Let me also acknowledge the organizers of this conference and thank them for asking me to present this keynote address. I must say that the history of archives and records is an area that is a little out of my expertise; however, in developing this address, I have been able to reflect on a number of things that are important to my business and it has given me some fresh insight into a number of areas that are central to my role in a native title representative body and the creation of evidence to support native title claims.

By way of introduction, my name is Glen Kelly. I am a Wardandi Noongar, obviously with European heritage as well, and am the Chief Executive Officer of the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC).

SWALSC is a community organization with a membership of some 2500 Noongar people, and we are very much an organ of the Noongar community. SWALSC is also the Native Title Representative Body (NTRB) for the south west of Western Australia, that is, we have been certified by the Commonwealth Government to deliver services as defined in the Native Title Act (1993). As a result, SWALSC has statutory functions which are, broadly speaking, the representation of native title claims.

This of course shapes the types of things that I am going to speak on today, and the general context will be from the direction of a native title representative body and native title claims.

Summary

Introduction

In 1993 the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) established the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 (ICTY) ‘for the sole purpose of prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia’ (UNSC, 1993; Bassiouni and Manikas, 1996; Scharf, 1997; Bass, 2000). The central purpose of the ICTY, as of any criminal court, is the deterrence of, and retribution for, serious wrongdoing (Osiel, 1997). But from the start, expectations of what the Tribunal could achieve went beyond the primary judicial goal of establishing the truth about and giving an historical record of what happened, contributing to healing individuals’ and communities’ traumas, and to reconciliation (Power, 2002). Connected with the diverse expectations of the outcomes of the Tribunal's work are expectations of the role the Tribunal's archives can play. Expectations are mounting as the ICTY's work is near completion and decisions about the legacy of the Tribunal are imminent.

In this essay, I explore the potential of the ICTY archives in establishing truth, engaging with history and practising memory – all of which may help communities in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere not only come to grips with their own past but also acknowledge a past shared with neighbouring ethnic and political communities. I will argue that these expectations can only be met by a living archive as a place of contestation, allowing for what Hayden White has called different kinds of discourse about ‘what happened and what is to be done’ – the archive not merely as a storage technique but primarily as a force for delegitimation of mythified and traditionalized memories (White, 2000, 55).

‘Sarajevo joins race for ICTY archive’ (Dnevni avaz, 2007)

‘Discussion on the fate of ICTY archive’ (Nezavisne novine, 2007)

‘Fighting for the Hague documents’ (Nedeljni Telegraf, 2008)

‘BiH, Serbia, Croatia all lobby to take over ICTY archives’ (Vecernji list, 2008)

With headlines like these, the media in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska, Serbia and Croatia brought the archives of the ICTY into the limelight. The headlines also attest to contesting views on the fate of the archives, which vary by region in the former Yugoslavia. And even within one region there are competing views.

Summary

RECORDS AND ARCHIVES are important resources for individuals, organizations and the wider community. Records are created in the course of the functions and activities of organizations and the personal lives of individuals, and are preserved and maintained to support business and accountability and for cultural use. They provide evidence of, and information about, the actions of their creators and the environment in which those actions occurred. They extend and corroborate human and corporate memory and play a critical role in maintaining awareness of how the present is shaped by the past. Records are kept by almost everyone, but their management (and especially their medium-term and long-term management) is a professional discipline with its own distinctive body of knowledge. Within the discipline, ‘records’ and ‘archives’ are sometimes used as synonyms, but in English-speaking countries ‘archives’ usually denotes records which have been recognized as having long-term value. The term ‘archives’ can also be used more widely, to refer to collections of historical materials maintained by organizations, individuals, families or community groups, or to the locations where such materials are held.

The series Principles and Practice in Records Management and Archives aims both to disseminate and to add to the body of professional knowledge and understanding. Each text in the series is intended to offer a detailed overview of one or more key topics. The archives and records management discipline is experiencing rapid changes - not least as a result of the digital revolution - and the series will fully reflect the new technological context as well as the societal changes and governmental initiatives in many countries that are placing new emphases on compliance, accountability, access to information and community relations. Some volumes in the series will address theoretical and strategic issues relating to the creation, management and interpretation of records and archives or their role in society; others will give practical guidance for those seeking successful and effective ways of managing them and presenting them to users. The authors come from many countries worldwide and are recognized experts in the field.

Community Archives: the shaping of memory The fourteen essays in this book offer a range of perspectives on archives and communities, and on the interactions and interrelations between them.

Summary

SEEKING, BUILDING OR dwelling within the close kinship of community is both an acute desire and a pressing need for many citizens of our global, unbounded and networked 21st century society. These desires and needs often find expression through records. Through their formation, collection, maintenance, diffusion and use, records in all their manifestations are pivotal to constructing a community, consolidating its identity and shaping its memories. Archivists have significant roles to play in this process. Sustaining a community – whether digitally or physically – depends not only on a practical and theoretical understanding of its records but also on the knowledge and ability to preserve and value them. The collection of essays in this volume addresses both the ability of archivists to assist in the community-building process and the responsibilities that archivists have in fostering and furthering all aspects of that development. For while records may fulfil beneficial and legitimating roles in our search for community, they also have other often prescriptive, less benign, but no less critical parts to play. As they demonstrate the many different ways in which communities and records interact with one another, these essays call our attention to both the salutary and the controversial acts of record making and record keeping, illustrating how these activities in themselves may create community.

Every volume presents its own intellectual and professional challenges. This volume is no different. The central challenge is the idea of ‘community’ itself. How do you ask authors to write essays about community when the concept is so ambiguous, so difficult to define? How do you construct a collected volume around ideas that are generally ‘understood’ but not well articulated, that essentially are agreed upon to be fundamentally subjective? While the subjectivity of ‘community’ initially lay at the heart of the editors’ concerns it also proved to be the glue, binding all definitions together and resulting in rewarding analyses as well as inspired and unexpected insights. The authors in this volume, an eclectic group of archivists, librarians and lawyers, approach questions of community from a range of national, cultural and individual perspectives that highlight both the versatility of ‘community’ and its close connection to memory and identity.

The 14 essays in this book make immediately clear that there is no one definition of ‘community’ or even of ‘archives’ and that both of these concepts assume widely disparate meanings in different contexts.

Summary

In this chapter we look at:

Summary

Introduction: feeling good

Invoking the notion of community as part of our professional mandate is another way we can feel good about what we do. We feel good if we can say we build or connect to community, even if we are not altogether sure about what it means. Indeed, community may have as many definitions as information. Social pundits invoke it to urge citizens to take control of improving the quality of their lives and to understand a broader public good. Real estate agents carefully describe it to market and sell a house, affirming that location is everything. Historians study its meaning, or use it as a means of focusing their investigations. Sociologists use it as a way of investigating social, political, economic and other trends in society. Journalists and others in the media use the term for their investigative reporting.

Community is seen by many to be an asset; to not belong to a community is a problem, a detriment to living out life to its fullest. The point here is that being part of some sort of community is deemed to be a normal part of humanity, and it is seen as an essential objective if one seems disconnected from a community. Professions, such as are represented by archivy, are also communities, and archivists usually feel just as good when they commune with each other at conferences, workshops and other venues.

The current interest in community may be the result of so many thinking it is endangered in the digital era. Before a few hundred years ago, humanity lived in local communities, and they often could do so in some degree of isolation. The rise of commercial networks, the broadening intellectual Enlightenment, the emergence of telecommunications, the demands of the Industrial Revolution for raw materials, and the electronic computer revolution all brought with them threats to how we conceived community. Another way of looking at this is to understand the shift from agrarian to mechanical to virtual time, where we see a transition from very natural to extremely artificial notions of timing our daily routines. The earliest notions of community were delineated by how far one could walk to beat out a living and back again, and that distance kept expanding from feet to horse or animal power to steam, then automotive and, finally, air power.

Summary

Introduction

Vanishingly few purely oral cultures – those that do not even communicate with a literate culture – still exist in the world. There are numerous indigenous cultures with many nonliterate members; there are also myriad modern literate subcultures that preferentially preserve all or some tradition in oral form. Both, however, are embedded to greater or lesser extent in a web of global literate cultures of varying local intensities. Some historians have argued that tradition preserved orally is not valid evidence, while others recognize it as a category of ‘memory’ that has its own rules of resonance. Modernist western archivists, themselves ref lexively literate, sit uneasily in between: charged with supporting the preservation of records of the past, they have until recently adhered to a practice almost exclusively focused on written textual objects. Now they are being confronted with memory modalities that challenge the model of sequential written text as sufficient documentation for all human cultural phenomena.

Production of information, oral and written: the ‘orality and literacy’ episteme

Although few communities in the early 21st century completely lack some kind of literacy, it is also true that few are completely documented by the written word, or will ever be so. Thus nearly all communities’ communication and recording of memory take place in a mixed environment. The discussion of orality and literacy as modalities for recording and preserving the past has most frequently been focused, somewhat abstractly, on cultures and communities seen as characterized by ‘pure orality’ – that is, communities where no written language is produced at all – or by ‘literacy’ – taken as communities where everyone is literate. Further, this discourse has been connected historically with an orientalist discourse that placed ‘oral’ and ‘literate’ in a family of binary oppositions including ancient–modern, primitive–civilized and inferior–superior, together with an argument that holds that literacy ‘transforms consciousness’ (for the better, of course) (Ong, 1991). Yet the adequacy of this whole approach to ranking the value of written and oral documentation, with its implication that the written word is more accurate or true than the orally transmitted word, has been set aside as historians and anthropologists have turned away from a positivist view of history and culture and have recognized that all literate cultures still retain many oral practices (Olson and Torrance, 1991).

Summary

Are there cases in which records contain practical information, but in which the real significance is larger and more symbolic? O'Toole, 1993, 238

Introduction

In recent years archival scholars have pondered the complex association between archives and collective memory (see, for example, Taylor, 1982; Foote, 1990; Brown and Davis-Brown, 1998; Brothman, 2001; Craig, 2002; Schwartz and Cook, 2002; Jimerson, 2003; Piggott, 2005a; Piggott, 2005b; Rosen, 2008). Some have examined this relationship in a critical fashion, emphasizing the inherent problems of the claim while dispelling the almost automatic and often unexamined assertion of their synonymity. Calls for more nuanced characterization of archives’ relationship with memory and their communities have gained much attention. Assertions of the archives–memory relationship vary from the critical – ‘connecting archives with memory is, of course, in one important respect, misleading’ (Harris, 2001, 5; Craig, 2002, 278) – to the convinced – ‘Memory, like history, is rooted in archives. Without archives, memory falters, knowledge of accomplishments fades, pride in a shared past dissipates’ (Schwartz and Cook, 2002, 18). The various articulations of the problematic contexts and apparent limitations of records, archives and archivists either as evidence, sources, inspiration, shapers or mediators of memory prompt further reflection. They also underscore the need to find more evidence of how archives (as both social institutions and collections of records), archivists and record-keeping functions might figure in the construction and remembrance of the past by societies, groups or communities.

A few terms have been suggested in the attempt to illustrate this association. Among these are Laura Millar's (2006) ‘touchstones’ which refers to how records function to trigger memories and the recollection of past events. Margaret Hedstrom uses ‘interface’, a term often associated with computing technology, to describe the capacity of archivists as intermediaries between documents and their users that ‘enable, but also constrain, the interpretation of the past’ (Hedstrom, 2002, 22). Similarly, Robert McIntosh puts forward the notion of archival ‘authorship’ to emphasize the mediating role of archivists in memory creation as they ‘practice a politics of memory, a determination of what will be remembered’ (McIntosh, 1998, 18). Ref lecting on the archival experiences in South Africa in its transition from apartheid to democracy, Verne Harris concludes that records comprise mere ‘archival slivers’ of the events and processes that they are supposed to embody and reveal.

Summary

THIS BOOK AIMS to help library and information services (LIS) workers at all levels and in all industry sectors in the UK and globally to survive and thrive in the 21st century. ‘All levels’ include those in careers spread across all sectors of library and information work (such as local government, private or ‘special’ and academic libraries) and electronic information related posts such as webmasters and knowledge managers. We intend that – like our other titles – this book will be useful to an international audience.

We believe that there is still a lot of potential to reach users through changing methods of communication, and electronic information workers and digital librarians have some more work to do. You can track people through websites, but it is more difficult to understand why they navigate the way they do as well as seeing where they navigate.

Keep in touch with any new user or user group and track their behaviour to see if new patterns of behaviour are forming. Watch what other industries such as publishing are doing to make their users come to them. Expand your activities to cover online networks, digital libraries and other forms of social networking.

We encourage all information workers to constantly think ‘out of the LIS box’ – looking at your LIS with new eyes and new knowledge at all times, and find out how to stay ahead of the game.

Summary

In this chapter we look at:

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12 - Overcoming anonymity: Kittitians and their archives

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3 - The Single Noongar Claim: native title, archival records and aboriginal community in Western Australia

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7 - A living archive, shared by communities of records

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Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction to the series

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Introduction: Communities and archives – a symbiotic relationship

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7 - Keeping track of changes in what users want

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Conclusion: The archivist and community

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4 - Oral tradition in living cultures: the role of archives in the preservation of memory

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Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

Miscellaneous Endmatter

Part 1 - A community archives model

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11 - ‘All the things we cannot articulate’: colonial leprosy archives and community commemoration

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Preface

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3 - What is the current knowledge about your users and their needs – is it really predictable?

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Part 5 - Building a community archive

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