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Final Commentary Session of the Appraisal SeminarMonash University by TERRY COOK Some reflections on Canadian and Australian archival traditions: A lot of resonances today about metadata and the evolving record are certainly ringing bells for me from the work that Tom Nesmith and I were identified with during the mid-1980s. Tom then coined the phrase "the history of the record" to describe a major focus of archival work and of archivists’ research, that each record has its own history, that it evolves and constantly changes over time both before it comes to an archives and after it comes to an archives. At that time, I wrote of records moving from a status of information to knowledge and that, as they do so, they develop or acquire complex, changing relationships, connections, and interconnections. I think that in a rather crude way we were in Canada anticipating a lot of the thinking that's been going on in Australia recently. I think Canadians more than other archival traditions have been more explicitly postmodern in taking these mid-1980s perspectives into new formulations for the late 1990s: Joan Schwartz, Brien Brothman, Rick Brown, Candace Loewen, Tom Nesmith, and myself, among others. These postmodern formulations, such as I alluded to them here in 1993 and published later in Archives and Manuscripts, explored archival "context" more deeply: Looking at questions of positions and orders, of one voice or many voices, of centres and power and of borders and margins and the marginalized, of evolving historical- and cultural-based theories and practices rather than universal rigidities, asserting a greater fluidity, so that the centres that we used to hold for some terms and ideas are slipping in time and space, emphasizing that there is a necessity not just to look at text but at the context behind the text. Such contextual perspectives crudely expressed as simple provenance, although it is much deeper than that is something archivists have always done. I said somewhere that archivists were the first postmodern profession, but didn't recognise it or realise it, and now that they do, many don’t seem to want it! But at that level of contextuality, where is the power? Who is actually free to run this and for what reasons? What are the expectations and accountabilities? From Australia, there has long been a similar kind of thinking, which certainly has influenced my ideas. I've extolled the work, once I learned of it, of Peter Scott, who blew up the whole approach to thinking about archives which had dominated the Western world, by saying that records don't exist in a necessary or single place, and that consequently series should be separated from imprisonment in a single hierarchical record group, or the more recently warmed up version of it, the fonds in Canada as imported and modified from Europe, and in RAD and ISAD(G). Scott saw that records can exist in many types of relationships and organizational cultures and communication patterns, not the single one-to-many top-down hierarchical approach of classic archival description, but in many-to-many, one-to-many, or many-to-one, relationships, all between records and creators and functions and legislative frameworks. There is an infinite variety of rich contextual relationships, and we're all now coming around to see Scott wisdom again for our electronic world. I see Frank Upward's work on the continuum as extraordinarily suggestive and fruitful. It provides a model for integrating the public archives and private manuscripts traditions, and many international archival traditions as well -- Australia, Europe, and Canada's total archives approach. But more than that, through the four dimensions and the four axes, there is movement. There is movement inward from the fourth dimension to the first dimension, and movement outward from the first to the fourth dimension. And also through the dimensions, looking at the continuum as a kind of plastic sheet, you can think of three or four of these across space and time as well as across the axes. It incorporates records and record-keeping, record products and record processes, nouns and verbs, being and becoming, if you like. That's an extraordinarily rich model through which to view but also unite archival theory, practice, and a sense of mission in every sphere of archival activity. I think that was perhaps best symbolized for me this week by Chris Hurley’s amazing fifteen levels of changing and evolving contexts, exploding forever the simplistic notion that there are only three dimensions of a record -- context, structure, and content. There is a much greater variety of information about the context of record than we originally assumed, which should force us to rethink just what we mean by provenance, upon which everything else is based. This changes everything. So this sense, both in Canada of the history of records, the evolving records, of records being looked at from different perspectives, of decentred positions from which a record changes perspectives, and the Australian notion that there's not one fixed place for a record, that it’s evolving, that it exists in the four dimensions and the four axes, leads to what I consider to be the most important question that any archivist has ever asked, and that is by Sue McKemmish: "are records ever actual?" Actual in the fixed, concrete, finite, time-bound sense. Yet the "record" is seen as the absolute centre of archival thinking and activity. I would suggest that Sue, and the developments I’ve sketched above, have exploded that central tenet of the profession. It is not hard to imagine that in future we'll be appraising metadata, not records; preserving and migrating and even describing metadata; using information about or from metadata rather than of records for most public access. This presumes that appraisal is a part of record-keeping, which is about creating metadata, as opposed to creating documents. All this change is, quite frankly, when you stop to think about it, quite radical, even revolutionary, by archival traditional standards. I quite agree with this direction. Do you?
This line of thought raised some questions with the participants. Is there a difference between a record and an archival record and if so what is it? Is greater clarity achieved through the continuum view of an archival document having the capacity to be captured and managed as a record. Is there value in the notion of an archival threshold, and is the threshold necessarily only physical, or also or maybe instead juridical or conceptual or virtual? Or rather than the metaphor of sharp thresholds, is it better to view the archival record question as content linked to an extended and continually evolving contextual metadata, thus continually changing the record object as it acquires new or additional contextual metadata. This would include the notion from Muller, Feith, and Fruin of the "archive" as the whole of the records, extant and not extant. Cook's Top 10 list Based on these reflections and musings, and on what we have discussed this week, let me offer my conclusions of what I think we accomplished, and see if you agree. Think of this as Cook’s Top Ten List, with an escalating level of provocation for a Friday afternoon! So, do we agree that:
1. Appraisal in "the big sense" is a record-eeping process integral to all levels and all axes of records continuum. 2. Appraisal should be focused on functions, processes, activities,and transactions, not on subjects or records. 3. Appraisal in the traditional sense, or in "the small sense," meaning the value or perspectives that an archivist adds to appraisal and to what has already been determined in the AS 4390 framework based on the creator’s needs, are five: Ensuring documentation on citizen interaction with and varience from the state Listening for and documenting marginalized voices in transactions Integrating cross-institutional and cross-jurisdictional functional perspectives Complementing and supplementing private and public archives connections Researching and adding continually evolving time-space dimensions to metadata 4. Archivists working in a record-keeping continuum must especially maintain an independent perspective to guard against capture by corporate agendas, and thus reverting de facto to Jenkinsonian appraisal standards, where the powerful in society define by default the collective and societal memory. They must be a powerful voice for society’s pluralized memories in the fourth dimension of the continuum looking inward as they work with creators primarily from the first dimension outward. 5. As a corollary, records are not so much evidence of David Bearman's business transactions or AS 4390's business activity as they are evidence of human activity. That brings private archivists in from "beyond the pale" and expands the role and perspective of the institutional and public archivist. 6. Appraisal never ends. Records are subjected to appraisal continually on either side of the so-called archival threshold. In other words, there is no such thing as the concept of "reappraisal" so much as one of "continual appraisal." 7. Our appraisal and descriptive tools must be linked, so that destroyed records and kept records, and the reasons for both decisions, are well researched, documented, transparent, and available to our many publics, now and over time. When people read an archival series description, they should also see what related records were destroyed and why. This is a minimum level of accountability to which the appraisal process, and appraising archivists, should be held. 8. Appraisal is then, from this perspective, the only archival activity! We (and our successors) are continually assigning value and making choices in all our actions, that affect the contexts, uses, and perceptions of all surviving records. 9. The profession is plagued with what I'd call the Darwinian contraction. In the traditional approach of the profession, which we must remember came out of the nineteenth and early twentieth century Darwinian and Spencerian modes of thought, records are seen as natural, organic, and unselfconscious by-products, as the life-blood of organizations, and yet also as strict evidence of actions to be frozen in time in original orders, unaltered contexts, fixed descriptive groups, objectively and impartially by archivists as guardians. Yet, and here’s the contradiction, the Darwinian processes are also very much about evolution, about change, mutation, constant growth, survival of the fittest. So, what's going on here? I would suggest that the archival pioneers picked up the rhetoric of Darwinian naturalism while retaining their rationalist Enlightenment mindsets. Peter Scott, the Australian continuum champions, and the Canadian postmodernists understood or at least reflect the substance of Darwin. Rather than crossing the threshold of the archival temple in pristine white robes, records perhaps "are red in tooth and claw." Is appraisal "survival of the fittest?" Who, then, decides what "fit" means? 10. The archivist is an active agent of institutional behaviours, influencing records creation and capture, and collective and societal memory. All this is relative, contingent, subjective. This may be seen as frightening, as Booms and others have suggested, or as a liberating and empowering force. I see it very much as the latter.
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Other questions from the group on the last day from the Flip Chart: Our appraisal/disposal tools need to take into account the following issues: Record as an evolving process, not only as products but also as processes, relationships and metadata roles. Is the notion of "community expectations’ being established via law, regulatory expression, and business rules for accountability wide enough to encompass the traditional notion of archival records being available for their "research use"
How are we accountable to the community for our appraisal processes? Issues of levels of methodology, criteria, or individual disposal authorisations? Recordkeeping transparency in electronic records based on functions/work processes. How do we do this? What tools do we need? The difficulties of automating human subtlety and knowledge bases
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