Moving appraisal into the light

No matter what one may have to say about Terry Cook, the Canadian archivist and theorist is at least correct in what he writes about appraisal and what he calls the "great silence" between archivists and historians (and ostensibly any other users of archives). "Appraisal," he wrote,

imposes a heavy social responsibility on archivists. As they appraise records, they are doing nothing less than shaping the future of our documentary heritage. They are determining what the future will know about the past, which is often our present. As a profession, we archivists need to realize continually the gravity of this task. We are literally creating archives. We are deciding what is remembered and what is forgotten, who in society is visible and who remains invisible, who has a voice and who does not. (1)

Appraisal, though controversial, is the "only archival endeavor," Cook argued. And yet archivists are mainly silent about this except among ourselves. How many times have we given the elevator speech about what we practice and spoken only of the preservation of our national or cultural heritage and inadvertently left out that 97% of records don't survive - either culled by their creators or the victims of our appraisal?

The cases weren't even the really old ones!
I don't get out of bed for records less than
sixty years old.

So thus it is unsurprising when bloggers concerned with government transparency or the voices of America's downtrodden exploded with unmitigated anti-government fury when they heard that the National Archives and Records Administration intend to destroy court records, a story often usually tied to some ginormous number like - as in the case of the court records - 10 million+ court cases.

This brouhaha erupted just at the end of my internship at NARA-Seattle and many of us were justifiably angry with the unthinking bloggers who typed before they really knew what they were talking about. We knew what takes place behind the scenes - the records scheduling, the appraising for historical value, the constant justification for preservation - and wondered why NARA wouldn't issue an official response. (They finally have, here: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2011/nr11-174.html.)

But archivists also know the sad truth: that there just aren't the resources to save everything users of archives would have us save. Americans have not yet decided to dedicate the kind of resources to their cultural heritage institutions that would even allow archivists to save everything they would like to save. So archivists take a sober, practiced approach to deciding what to expend those meager resources on and what goes into witness disposal. It's not an objective process, but ideally, good archivists base those decisions on sound acquisition and disposition policies and include historians and other user groups on projects of great magnitude, like the National Archives has done here.

This is a great start, but archivists need to do a better job of talking about destruction, amongst ourselves and - more importantly - with the public. The bloggers who typed first and asked - or didn't ask - questions later aren't trained archivists and probably don't know any. They know archives only by what they've accessed and have been unable to access in archival institutions.

At the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in Chicago last week, Dr. Susan E. Davis chaired a panel entitled "Genuine Encounter, Authentic Relationships: Archival Covenant and Professional Self-Understanding" (Session #210). Scott Cline went in-depth on the concept of "covenant" and its roots in moral, ethical, and philosophical values, that there is an I/you relationship in all archival activities and that these relationships should be based on mutual respect, responsiveness, and reciprocity. He argued that the archivist must "endeavor to disclose the continual making and remaking of the record." Dr. Brian Brothman floated ideas he's been assembling for (hopefully!) an upcoming publication and exhorted archivists to have a greater "preoccupation" with the dead, who are the primary components of our records and who form an integral, complex, and vital part of the social order. He argued that archivists are "scientists of distance and proximity, architects of distanciation." As archivists, we have the power to connect society with the dead or to remove us further, depending on how we engage in archival practice. "Contracts are made in suspicion, self-validation, and separation," he said. "Covenants are made in trust or love."

Archivists ought to endeavor to form a covenant with our users, one that requires complete honesty about preservation and destruction. Having those policies but staying mum on them and requiring users to search for them does not fulfill a covenant, but rather has the aura of a contract, an agreement in which one does only what he or she must. Love requires one to be proactively honest. This, then, is the only way we can engender trust with our users and the bloggers who reflexively attack at mention of the phrase, "destruction of records."

(1) Terry Cook, "Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory," in Archives, Documentation, and Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. Francis X. Blouin, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), p. 169.