Are the Administrative and Cultural Values of Archives Compatible?

(revised to reflect delivery)

Presentation to Appraisal Seminar
Monash University
Melbourne, VIC
16 March 1999

by

TERRY COOK
Archival Studies
University of Manitoba

Here we go again! We are starting out, as Barbara said yesterday, in the fourth dimension (perhaps beyond!) of the continuum model, at the outer edge, looking inward as it were. Out at that outer edge where is found collective memory, broad societal purposes, archival cultures, and pluralized values. Are these fourth-dimension features compatible with an implicit focus in the inner circles of the continuum, at least for institutional record-keepers, on administrative values and the creation and maintenance of evidence? We have in short a couple of dichotomies to explore: administrative versus cultural values for archives, and evidence versus memory, and questions of objectivity and subjectivity that swirl around these. This morning thus builds on some of yesterday’s broader issues and assertions that I made, and you all discussed in the workshops, with perhaps a bit more explicit emphasis on electronic records.

There is in the international archival profession now a fundamental division about the purposes, orientation, and, indeed, very nature of archives, as institutions and as holdings. I might characterize this as an unresolved tension between the concepts of evidence and memory. This dichotomy has fuelled controversies in recent years that have divided archivists over such fundamental functions as appraisal and description; over approaches or strategies to such seemingly contentious issues as electronic records, documentation strategies, reference and outreach activities, and, here and elsewhere, over continuums vs. life cycles; or, more basically still, over the nature of archival education and thus the very characteristics of what makes an ideal archivist at the end of the century. It goes yet deeper to our topic, to whether archives are primarily administrative, juridical entities or heritage, cultural ones, and deeper yet over whether archives are passive objective documentary evidence of past actions or active subjective constructions of social memory. Not all these dichotomies are parallel, nor do they equate to the public archives tradition versus the historical manuscript tradition. Perhaps these harsh either-or choices may themselves be the problem, and we should sensibly look for some blend, but for now these divisions seem to hold fast.

The central myth of archives has traditionally focused on evidence. Listen to the great archival pioneer, Sir Hilary Jenkinson, who, writing early in the century, describe the ideal archivist in the gendered language of his time: "His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his Aim, to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge ... the good Archivist is perhaps the most selfless devotee of Truth the modern world produces...." That quotation appears in no less than four of his publications. The central archival professional concepts of respect des fonds, original order, and provenance, defined by the French and Germans in the nineteenth century, codified by the Dutch in their famous manual 101 years ago, extolled by Jenkinson in 1922, and followed by virtually every major textbook writer since, were designed precisely in order to preserve records as evidence of the functional-structural context and of the actions that caused their creation. Following these core principles of archival theory or archival science, and related procedures, as I outlined yesterday, archivists hope to reflect or, where necessary, recreate, as transparently as possible, among records transferred to the custodial control of an archives, the order and character of the records as they were with their original (and subsequent) owners. Such transparency, it is alleged, allowed records to serve as trustworthy evidence of the facts, actions, and ideas of which they bear witness, for which they are, in short, the evidence. Strict adherence to these principles would allegedly also eliminate, or reduce to a bare minimum, any interference by the archivist in the evidence-bearing characteristics of archives, thus safeguarding the documentary "Truth" of the modern world, as Jenkinson put it, and with a capital "T". Archivists were keepers, guardians, custodians, of records, with the characteristics of the neutral, objective, impartial, passive broker between creator and researcher, working (again, following and quoting Jenkinson) "without prejudice or afterthought." As I mentioned yesterday, this view precluded any role in appraisal to archivists, with Jenkinson leaving the choice of records for posterity to the creators of records, thereby preserving the alleged impartiality and objectivity of the archivist.

This focus of the archival pioneers on evidence also mirrored concerns of writers in earlier centuries on diplomatics, who devised rules of document analysis to detect forgeries masquerading as genuine records. But this emphasis on evidence does not rest solely with either the diplomatic roots or the pioneering texts of the archival profession. David Bearman, the leading thinker about archival electronic records, entitled his 1994 collected essays, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations, which included analysis of the landmark University of Pittsburgh projects on the functional requirements for record-keeping in an electronic world, a project he re-titled at its end as the functional requirements for evidence. The University of British Columbia’s current electronic records research project has as its central goal developing strategies for the preservation over time of "authentic" and "reliable" computer records, these being the twin watchwords of high-quality evidence, of trustworthy "records" as contrasted to decontextualized information or transient data. And US National Archivist John Carlin’s 1997 strategic plan for the National Archives and Records Administration bears the title, Ready Access to Essential Evidence.

But archives also preserve memory. Back to Carlin’s phrase, the key word now becomes "essential" and thus determining what small portion of the evidence is "essential." Archival legislation, official mission and mandate or "purpose" statements, archival annual reports, and speeches of senior archives officials -- including the President of France and the Pope -- continually refer to the archival role in preserving the "collective memory" of nations, peoples, institutions, movements, and individuals; or they refer to preserving records of "significance" or "value" or "importance" which, put another way, means separating preserving those worth remembering, or, again, separating what is "essential" from what is not. Archives in this focus are a source of memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and family connections, about who we are as human beings and about glimpses into our common humanity and shared identities through recorded information in all media.

Yet memory is notoriously selective -- in individuals, in societies, and in archives. With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, and the marginalizing or silencing of others. Ever since archivists began in the 1940's to face the appraisal issue squarely in our century of massive volumes of over-documentation in all media, archivists have had a major role -- often the exclusive legislated role -- of deciding the nature of the tiny sliver of records that will be preserved in an archives, and they have then granted (usually) explicit authority to destroy (or to benignly neglect) all the rest. This is a value-laden task. Because of the resulting need for the archivist to research and understand the complex nature of the functions, structures, actors, processes, and related contexts of creation and contemporary use, and because of the need to interpret their relative importance as the basis for modern archival appraisal (and, I would assert, of description too), and because of the archivists’ growing involvement in "up front" computer system design to ensure that the properties of reliable evidence will even exist for key electronic records systems, because of all these needs, the traditional notion of the impartiality of the archivist as neutral guardian or objective keeper of evidence handed to her or him at the end of the life cycle is no longer acceptable -- if ever it was. Archivists inevitably will inject their own values into all such research and decision-making, from system design requirements to appraisal and acquisition, from description in all manner of finding aids to preservation and copying choices, from types of services provided to document selections for exhibitions, publications, CD-ROM printing, and web site postings. Archivists have thus changed over the past century, in my view, from being Jenkinson's passive keepers and defensive guardians or custodians of an entire documentary residue left by creators to becoming active shapers of social memory through the formation of the archival heritage. They are, in Nancy Bartlett’s happy phrase, continual mediators between past, present, and future, between creators, records, and researchers. Archivists, with colleagues in museums, galleries, libraries, and historic sites, are the leading architects in building society's memory. As Barbara quoted from Tom Nesmith in opening our proceedings, and as Margaret Hedstrom emphasized in her ASA keynote address, that the record survives at all, and is continually reshaped over time by new contexts, media migration, expanding descriptions, and new uses, is due to the actions of the archivist in large part.

This archival emphasis centred around the concept of "memory" is not merely the reflection of those few archivists like Tom, Margaret, and some of the rest of us, now happily growing in number, who recently have been exploring the implications of the postmodern revolution for our profession’s mission in society. Nor is it, as some "pro-evidence" archivists like to imagine, another manifestation of that alleged and, according to them, very unwelcome archival aberration caused by the French Revolution. In this misleading piece of archival mythology, the unruly citizens of Paris, in a contagion that spread throughout Europe and then the world’s archives, forced state archives to abandon their multi-millennial juridical calling, one that extended allegedly back to the Roman Empire, and instead linked state archives with nationalism and national culture, and with the then rising Romanticism and its idealization of the past, both fortified later by the nineteenth-century professionalization of history as a discipline and by citizens’ growing interest in their past, their personal histories and their collective identities.

In reality, unlike this professional mythology of an evidence-centred juridical past, archives long before 1789 were themselves hardly the legal-juridical enclave of lawyers jealously guarding evidence. Recent scholarship, spinning directly or indirectly from Michel Foucault's insights into the archaeology of knowledge and reflecting research in cultural studies and intellectual history, shows conclusively that in the ancient empires, in Medieval church and state, and in Renaissance Europe, archives were as much driven by the need to commemorate, to celebrate, to symbolize, to legitimize those in power, as they were by any need to preserve, without mediation or interference, transactional documents as complete and untainted legal evidence. Indeed, archives had their institutional origins in the ancient world as agents for legitimizing such power and for marginalizing those without power, of deciding who was allowed to speak and who was forced into silence, both in public life and in archival records. Medieval archives, historians now find, were collected -- and often weeded and continually reconstructed -- not only to keep evidence of formal legal and business transactions, but also explicitly to serve historical and sacral/symbolic purposes, but only for those figures and events judged worthy of celebrating, or memorializing, within the context of their time. Taking the opposite perspective and looking at those marginalised by the archival enterprise, feminist historians have convincingly demonstrated, from the Middle Ages to this century, the systemic exclusion of women from society's memory tools and institutions, including from archives. Or back to those with power, First World War British archives are now revealed to have been subjected to massive tampering and alteration in order to make Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig appear less culpable for the slaughter on the Western Front over which he had command and responsibility. One can, moreover, fill a very long shelf with new exciting historical studies in the past five to seven years about memory, commemoration, celebrations, all implicitly invoking the archival enterprise, and an equally long shelf on the history of museums and libraries -- but curiously not of archives, which are a blind spot for historians -- all of which writing support one consistent and, to me, overwhelmingly convincing conclusion: that all acts of societal remembering are increasingly -- and rightly -- perceived as culturally bound. Without overdramatizing the archival mission unduly, it is safe to say that all such acts have momentous implications. I have quoted Czech novelist Milan Kundera before in Australia, but his words are worth repeating: "the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." But whose memory? And who is forgotten? And who determines the struggle? Could it be that stereotypical half-dozing archivist in the dusty basement? That same allegedly objective, neutral, passive, self-effacing archivist of our professional lore? If so, then archivists, and historians, and other researchers and friends of archives, need to understand far better than they do, these "politics of memory," the very ideas and assumptions that have shaped and are shaping archival choices, if they want archives to reflect more accurately all components of the complex societies they allegedly serve, and, indeed, if they want to use archives intelligibly. They need to know (and have revealed to them transparently) who and what archivists are now excluding from archival collections because of the very archival theories, strategies, and practices of archives and archivists, even by fundamental definitions and professional discourse patterns.

Let me turn from generalities to concrete examples. Many of those archivists most involved with electronic records are increasingly, in focus, rhetoric, and action, becoming de facto or actual records managers, as these terms and professions were traditionally understood in North America, and, I gather from recent listserv exchanges about the continuum, also here in Australia. Continuum advocates might say that’s a good thing, and of course to a degree it is. But if archivists are doing others’ work, who is doing archival work? Who brings the broader cultural perspective to the table, fro tht pluralized fourth dimension? Who ensures that the voice of Gerald Ham’s broad spectrum of human experience is heard loudly and clearly in the archival legacy left by this generation of archivists? If passively and indirectly by allowing "community expectations" to affect record keepers through improve audit and accountability approaches, why are archivists so active and direct in their interventions in the inner directions of the continuum and yet more reluctant to do so in the fourth dimension? Such a "choice" or even passive non-choice favours a records management and record creators agenda, not a societal one.

Now there are a great many good reasons to work closely with records managers and records analysts and systems people, and I’ve articulated many of these in past publications, but that is not the same as becoming them, with the danger of being captured by corporate agendas and priorities, playing the tunes they wish to hear since they are paying the piper -- as has happened with the Archivists assigned for decades to departments of the French national government. What happens, to put the matter starkly, to records when they are eventually of no use to the creating institution, as all by the tiniest sliver of records must become, yet such records are costing significant dollars for preservation and migration, if administrative values and risk avoidance alone have been used to justify their retention to that point? Have we, in the justifiable urgency to find solutions to the electronic records problem, perhaps confused strategic means with cultural ends? Ironically enough, this inward-turn back to focus on the sponsor is occurring at a time when archives and archivists are urged on every front to look outward, to take archives to the people, in better and more relevant public programmes and outreach, in web-based virtual "archives without walls."

Let me amplify these assertions a little, but first the disclaimer! There is, to be sure, much that is appealing (and perhaps even necessary) about the new formulations that have been developed or are being developed for electronic records. (And I readily confess that I have had a hand in formulating some of these myself.) Certainly, the new electronic records concepts, by revitalizing the power of the principle of provenance in a virtual or conceptual way for a postcustodial world, powerfully link past to future in our professional culture in stimulating and reassuring ways, and build on, rather than reject, some core professional strengths and traditions centred around contextuality, interconnections, and interrelationships, and around the need for the archivist to do detailed functional analysis and in-depth research to build metadata traps at the front-end to create and capture reliable electronic records. All this is beneficial, and so too is the strategic repositioning of the archivist on a continuum as an ally of senior mangers, auditors, legal experts, FOI commissioners, and other key record users within an accountability framework of the creating institution, which thereby elevates the records professionals (including archivists and records managers) from the semi-clerical and marginalized stereotypes of the past to important roles as agents for organizational renewal and change.

The message of the new archival thinking is clear and beyond dispute: we as archivists can no longer afford to sit passively at the dusty end of the life cycle awaiting the arrival of dormant electronic records, but rather must actively intervene to shape the creation and capture of the future archival record at the system design or system implementation stages of the records continuum. We cannot, as someone once said, cope with "electronic records" while having "paper minds." By adopting these new strategies and formulations, we will become, at least in theory, players in the big leagues, rather than being consigned to the margins as cultural frills. Yet perhaps the attractions of the big leagues and the bright lights have seduced us, in relative terms, to forget why society needs archivists and what is the essential end and purpose of archival work over the long term.

Within the new approaches to electronic records, there are some real dangers to archives and archivists, and I believe more seriously to societal memory and our sense of the past, that is, to our culture as peoples and nations in that pluralized fourth dimension of the continuum. To be true to all dimensions of the continuum, we ourselves as archivists should be wary of these tendencies, and remember our overall profession’s mission includes strong programmes in both the private and government or institutional sectors (and in all media), AND a focus on preserving government records themselves for cultural and historical purposes long after any vestige of primary administrative use has vanished. Yet the whole language of electronic records archiving to date -- not unlike aspects of continuum positioning -- is institutional, corporate, business process, and transactional in its orientation. Definitions, for example, of a "transaction" as a business acceptable communication shared across machines or between people, and of "records" as reliable evidence of such transactions, powerfully shape the nature and scope of archives.

In this regard, there are two weaknesses. First, and rather obvious, such electronic records approaches ignore private-sector archives: what are we to do with the novelist or diarist, the artist or composer, the photographer or preacher, the explorer or painter, or a hundred others who commit their thoughts, their perceptions, their "records" of activities to electronic media, and yet do not communicate many of them as "business acceptable communications" or transactions? According to the new definitions, these people allegedly do not produce "records," and thus are cast outside the purview of archives and archivists -- "beyond the pale" as Adrian Cunningham and I have put it. In the same way, "data" from most database management systems is likewise cast outside archives to become the purview of data libraries and data research centres, leaving archives only pristine "records" (as newly defined) to manage and preserve. What status does this leave other "product"-based archival media, like film or photographs? Even if a societal evidence "warrant" or justification were to be articulated for private record-keeping, as Sue McKemmish and Chris Hurley have suggested, reaching such records creators and having them implement functional metadata requirements, at least before all commercial and popular software automatically imbeds such requirements (and their capacity for forward migration) into every new release, is simply not realistic, and therefore such private creators remain de facto excluded from the electronic records definitions, and thus from the resulting archival universe.

Secondly, for government or institutional records, if the full functional requirements for record-keeping are only, after using risk analysis methodologies, to be applied to those types of transactions for which not having reliable evidence would pose a serious risk to the institution or its clients, as has been suggested, then the factors for determining what has "value" will ipso facto reflect those institutions’ selfish or defensive needs, not the broader cultural perspective of archives in society, or even of the requirements for public accountability in a democracy concerning the actions of record creators. Archival appraisal will therefore be highjacked: a document is not a record at all in the new electronic archival world unless it bears the technological metadata or procedural stamp of the functional requirements, yet such resource-intensive technological encoding will only be applied in resource-lean times to those documents which the institution itself thinks are important.

While David Bearman as one such theorist is careful to say that he does not deal with appraisal, his strategy de facto does impose "value" through risk analysis and system design in the manner just described, and such "values" in my view are far too institutionally and narrowly driven to be acceptable to archivists charged with reflecting broader cultural and societal perspectives among archival holdings. As a corollary, it seems clear that this approach continues to privilege the powerful in society, those who can own (or can afford to implement) record-keeping systems. If everything but a transactional "record" is outside the purview of archives, then archival holdings will by definition only be drawn from that formal record-keeping universe. Such holdings will therefore exclude -- more than they already do -- the marginalized and weaker members of society, leaving the citizens silenced and governments emboldened. How then can archives be society's memory or indeed serve as "arm’s length" agents for public and social, let alone historical, accountability? Our past -- our culture -- would be truncated by our self-imposed professional definitions!

A second series of concerns about electronic records formulations now being advanced is the distinction between the needs for changing client organizations' behaviour and designing new record-keeping systems to replace current data systems or information systems on the one hand, and for dealing with present and legacy electronic records on the other. A piece of hard reality is that there is no single piece of software in existence that does what David Bearman or other reinventors of electronic archives wants it to do, and there is now no information system that meets the full functional requirements for reliable and authentic records or evidence. There is good progress towards implementing, or testing further, some of these record-keeping requirements and other strategic record-keeping approaches at the National Archives of Canada, in the ICA committee on electronic records, at the World Bank, here in Australia in continuum thinking, the AS 4390 standard, and the Monash matadata project, at New York State, the Netherlands, at the National Archives and Records Administration, in the City of Philadelphia, at the University of Indiana, at the University of British Columbia, and perhaps elsewhere. Despite such admirable progress, implementation of the functional requirements for record-keeping in purpose-designed metadata software is still pretty scattered and piecemeal on the world archival scene. For now, and perhaps for as long as the next ten years, the paradigm of achieving record-keeping and preserving evidence through imbedded software code will not be widely adopted in governments, businesses, universities, and other major corporations, and it will be even longer before it appears widely in private life.

The critical point then is what to do in the meantime: are we to write off a generation of history -- our own -- by not trying to preserve with our present, sometimes ad hoc, admittedly inadequate, but also often usefully pragmatic methods, the very electronic "records" created in these inadequate contemporary information systems, and, rather, entirely shift our focus to building record-keeping systems for the future? I have heard prominent commentators say just that, or others by their actions imply the same: "Yes, let the current stuff go and concentrate on fixing things so we won’t be in the same situation ten years from now that we are in now." In that they are partly right. If we only continue as we are, then we will retard seriously by many more years the implementation of the record-keeping approach which, in an ideal world, is what archivists need. But they are also wrong, in that significant evidence of actions, citizen’s rights and status, and societal activities can be extracted from imperfect current and legacy data systems. To write off an entire generation of history would be as irresponsible as it would (under most archival legislation) be illegal. Should the Bush White House information systems have been thrown out for not meeting the test of "recordness" or "evidence"? Or current census, immigration, prisoner, or aboriginal data? Or critical office systems, like Canada’s Free Trade Negotiations Office, whose system has been rescued, contextualized, processed, and preserved? As a profession, I think that we need to strike some better strategic balance between old and new electronic records, rather than overthrow either one for the other. That is another way of saying, we need to strike a better balance between an administrative and cultural agenda for archives, between working from the inner dimensions of the continuum looking outward and from the outer dimension looking inwards.

There is, I think, in all this a confusion between ends and means in recent thinking about archival electronic records initiatives. Such initiatives and theorists have given the archival profession many valuable means and tools to participate actively in contemporary record-keeping and in exciting prospects for reinventing government. I obviously agree, and have been part of that in Canada. But to what ends? If archival principles have animated some electronic records theorists' neo-provenance contextual insights, what about other dimensions of the traditional archival perspective?

So what of those wider archival perspectives that I’m alluding to? Well, what of appraisal for social, cultural, accountability, and historical values well beyond, and sometimes in sharp variance with, the sponsor’s much more limited (and often biassed and defensive) need for preservation of a small portion of its own records for administrative continuity, legal defence, bottom-line profit, and corporate memory? What of appraisal that crosses individual institution’s functional and structural boundaries, and indeed across archival jurisdictions? What of description that tries not only to link each record to its internal and operational metadata context, but also to interrelated functions, creators, and series of records now, and across institutions, time, and space? And what of our non-sponsor clienteles which in all tax-payer funded institutions are, quite frankly, our real sponsors, and whom we seem increasingly ready to jettison for an administrative agenda? On these "archival" as opposed to "record-keeping" or records management issues, many electronic records theorists of recent years are relatively silent.

Perhaps it is best to view many of the writers on electronic records (in a North American context anyway, but perhaps here also) as a new breed of revitalized records manager. There is nothing wrong with that. Archivists have always realized the need for close partnerships with records managers. But such partnerships with records managers by archivists is not the same thing as archivists becoming records managers, nor is it the same as merging the broader archival cultural agenda with the narrower record management or institutional administrative agendas. Certainly the archival agenda and institutional needs will often overlap and, when they do, archivists should happily follow the lead the electronic pioneers have so well delineated. But when they do not overlap, or the archival agenda is threatened, then archivists need to articulate anew their own objectives and strategies for an electronic era, especially in appraisal and description, in defining the nature of records, in establishing custodial arrangements, and in serving the archives’ many wider publics beyond institutional and sponsors' self-interest.

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Evidence and memory. Memory and evidence. Culture and administration. Administration and culture. Forever warring opposites? An irreconcilable set of dichotomies? Or maybe the two sides of the archival coin, in creative tension, each worthless without the other despite the fundamentally contrary implications they have for the archival endeavour. Without reliable evidence set in context, to be sure memory becomes bogus, or at least is transformed into forgery, manipulation, or imagination. Without the influence of and need for memory, evidence is largely useless and unused. Without acknowledging the mediation and intervention of the archivist in the construction of memory based on documentary evidence, the claims for that evidence of impartiality, objectivity, and mirror of "Truth" ring hollow at best, as professional arrogance and hubris at worst. Yet keeping evidence itself for society is a cultural activity.

As presently defined, therefore, are memory and evidence reconcilable? The answer at present from one perspective is not hopeful, or at least no more so than the possibility of reconciling the deeper post-modern and pre-modern filters through which these two camps of archivists uneasily view each other. But if memory and evidence are seen as less rigid categories, perhaps there is more hope. Matt Matsuda in his recent book The Memory of the Modern explores this theme. Matsuda notes that memory formation and subsequent use is necessarily problematical. "The past is not a truth upon which to build," he observes, in contrast to Jenkinson, "but a truth sought, a re-memorializing over which to struggle." This very struggle, this sense of contested memories, of differing constructions of the past, of continual mediation and shifting foci of what is fit to survive, is the very centre of postmodernist thinking. By implication, it rejects the positivist, scientific rationalism that underpins classic archival theory, and shows such theory to be problematical, to say the least, in its traditional articulation and application. But so too with the concept of evidence. Matsuda demonstrates, through case studies of late nineteenth-century France, that evidence, testimony, witnessing, and records were not inanimate and neutral repositories of acts and facts which a fickle and varying memory subsequently uses. Evidence -- yes, evidence, testimony, and records were themselves equally social and political constructs, each subject to mediation, interpretation, and bias. Evidence and memory are not polar opposites, therefore, but friendly cousins. And perhaps once we think through those implications, that for archivists will change everything.

Similarly, in looking at the other dichotomy of cultural and administrative values, cultural ends will never be achieved in the new record-keeping environments of the information age without a radical "up front" transformation and redefinition of the administrative value of archival work. No institutional creators, save the highly altruistic, is likely to implement very expensive reliable and authentic record-keeping systems unless there is some strong enlightened self-interest in doing so. Without such systems in place, the cultural ends of archives will not have the evidence required to sustain a flourishing societal memory. Yet this is not all one-sided. Cultural values may enhance administrative needs. Archivists have not explored in much detail the rich insights of a vast literature on organizational culture, work-place culture, communications culture, and organizational learning. Here there are human stories quite aside from business transactions, evidence of which stories properly captured by archivists may significantly help organizations to administer themselves better, wiser, even more profitably.

In this idea of the construction of collective memory based on reliable evidence, and in the need now for deeper research-based understanding of the functional processes of society and of its institutions’ operational and human cultures in order for archivists to undertake the new appraisal and description methodologies, there is, it seems to me, the prospect to develop some rich common concepts, common strategic focus, and common inspiration for archivists of both institutional and personal archives, of both administrative and cultural orientations in both private and public sectors. That chance needs to be seized by making our approaches to electronic records more inclusive for other segments of the archival profession and more relevant to long-term archival memory and societal needs, without overlooking the need to facilitate contemporary institutional record-keeping requirements. This is an achievable vision for archives in the twenty-first century. Will the vision be realized? Are the cultural and administrative values of archives compatible? For me, they should be, and Frank Upward’s continuum model points the way, if the work proceeds along the four axes from the outside inward with as much emphasis and priority as the traditional movement from the inside outward. That mutuality is much to be admired, but will it be achieved in the pressures of working reality? On that point, the jury is still very much out and deliberately fiercely.

Let me end with three bald-faced assertions for discussion!

I was told to be provocative, but maybe after this blast, I should follow the actions of dear old Elvis, and leave the building. Thank you.

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