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9 - The end of archival ideas?
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- By Craig Gauld, Lecturer in Archive and Information Studies, Centre for Archive and Information Studies (CAIS), at the University of Dundee in Scotland
- Edited by Caroline Brown
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- Book:
- Archival Futures
- Published by:
- Facet
- Published online:
- 01 June 2019
- Print publication:
- 07 August 2018, pp 137-154
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The central structure of this chapter is indebted to Robert Rowland-Smith, consultant, writer and lecturer on philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. In 2015, he argued that we are coming to the end of the Age of Ideas. In doing so, he examined how different ‘ages’ – of superstition, religion, reason and ideas – have emerged and gradually been eclipsed. His Ages of Reason and Ideas, and their subsequent deaths, chimed with thoughts the author had been having about the archival sphere and have been co-opted here.
(Rowland-Smith, 2015)Introduction
Caroline Brown, in the introduction to Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice, began with the following quotation from Anthony Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy:
Thomas Carlyle … was once reproached by a businessman for being too interested in mere ideas. ‘There was once a man called Rousseau’, Carlyle replied, ‘who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first’.
(Brown, 2014, xi)This quotation was used as a tool to lead into the professional schism that exists within the recordkeeping community between theory and practice. The stated purpose of the book was to ‘demonstrate the value of thinking about theory and its relationship with the practical world’ (Brown, 2014, xi). That there was a need for a publication with such a purpose is strange because we have, as a profession, fallen in love with ideas. Since the middle of the 1970s – from around the time of the publication of F. G. Ham's ‘The Archival Edge’ and the creation of the Archivaria journal in 1975 – the archival community has embraced innovative ideas and theories.