The Quantum Archivist

Ten years into the twenty-first century we are beginning to see a movement among archivists to move forward into the twentieth century. All this really means is that Archivists are beginning to understand the balance between being and becoming. The idea that constant change, balanced and tempered by a consistent theoretical foundation, might just be the roadmap for the profession is slowly permeating the ethos of more “modern” or forward thinking archivists.

Howard Besser says that most new technology is used at first to mimic the old ways in a new form. “The conceptual steps [of technology development] typically include first trying to replicate core activities that functioned in the analog environment.”  So it stands to reason then that before we could invent new forms of access we had to re-invent the paper finding aid in the form of EAD.

However, it seemed that in doing so we raised the finding aid, rather than access to the material itself, to the level of an objective and actually prevented archivists from providing good service in the Internet environment. Before the age of computers and digitization,  there really was no point in providing highly granular content information to users. You still had to come to the repository and interact with the content in ways that did not disrupt the physical order of the boxes and folders. This filing system approach, while efficient and effective in its time and place, was a barrier to use. Everyone understood this, but no one had any real idea of how to do it better or differently. Thus, archivists became the interpreters of collections, a kind of human finding aid.

As with any bureaucratic system (and I mean this in the most positive possible sense), once it was devised, a class of apparatchiks grew up to tend the system and became vested in its perpetuation. The essential conservative nature of archives also contributed to the idea that the finding aid was sacred and that the Archivist as gatekeeper was the best possible way to provide service. I’ll wager that this access method was never satisfactory to the general user, but then, the only “serious” researchers were supposed to use archives anyway.

I don’t want to say that the parents of EAD didn’t do creative work. But they were working within a context of thinking from which they were unable to break free. It would have been surprising if they had, and if they did, perhaps no one would have listened to them anyway.

My own introduction to formal archival education came just before the introduction of EAD, and since I came from a research and teaching background, my idea of what an archives could or should be was based on user-centered ideas (although I didn’t know that term at the time).  I wanted to get to the “stuff” and draw my own conclusions, after all, that’s what I was there for. Most of my work when I was a classroom teacher centered on teaching with primary sources. It was always surprising what a group of students would see in a set of documents that I had never seen.

When I crossed over from researcher/teacher to service provider, I always believed that keeping the researcher as close to the content as possible was the most important thing an archivist could do. Give them the stuff and get out of the way!

Although it is obviously not quite as simple as that, we do have the capability to do this now. The Internet and digitization makes this all possible. But just how will we do it? By constantly trying new ways to present our archival material.

A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation at the SAA meeting in Chicago that I called “Where Have All the Binders Gone?” That introduced an idea that we should try to manage and provide access as close to the content as possible. This later evolved into the theory of quantum archives and is the inspiration for this blog.