Annotation Summary for: Ketelaar 2004

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Annotation Summary for: Ketelaar 2004

 

Page 1,

Time future contained in time past. Archival science in the 21st century, in: Journal of the Japan Society for Archival Science 1 (2004) 20-35 [Japanese translation ibidem, 4-19].

 

Page 2,

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

 

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the first talks between the U.S. and Japan were carried out in Dutch.1

 

even  today  translating  from  onelanguage into another, even within the same scholarly domain, may cause difficulties.

 

definition: archival science studies the characteristics of records in their social and cultural contexts and how they are created, used, selected and transferred

through time. Archival science asks "why", where archival administration in my opinion asks "what" and "how".

 

 

The development of the archival discipline

The Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives by Muller, Feith and Fruin is mostly regarded as a starting point of modern archival science

Archival administration, is "the theoretical and practical study of politics, procedures and problems relating to archival functions"

Theoretical and practical.

Terry Cook the Dutch Manual owes its importance to the codification of the European archival theory and its enunciation of a methodology for treating archives

 

 

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the methodology became a doctrine.

 

But a doctrine is not science. A doctrine does not permit another vision, it is fundamentalist, not critical, it stimulates exegesis, but it doesn't encourage free independent research. Yet the doctrine has a role in the process of the professionalization of the archivist. Codification, normalization and regulation of the archival practice are important for the professionalization of archivists, literally when they are trained or 'disciplined', the archival discipline being a branch of learning

 

The disciplining or professionalization has more aspects: a specific professional language, a specific training, a specific ethical code and many more elements.

 

 

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The large body of old archives then becomes a source for history writing. The archival fonds had to be arranged and described. This practical need leads to the development of descriptive archives administration.

 

The extension of the sphere of work of the archivist necessitates extension of  archival  knowledge  and  in  some  countries even  the  development  of  a  new  discipline: records management. The archivistic domain is gradually extending and contains all stagesof the document cycle. Archival knowledge is extending accordingly.

 

What expects society of the archivist

general public value archives highly,associating archives with Memory and History collective memory and as a source to learn about the past.

only part of the mission of the archivist.

 

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has  to  ensure  not only that records are created and managed as evidence to serve accountability  and  memory,  but  also that  archives  are  preserved,  so  that  society  can  beconfident of the future

 

Archiving means: transmitting authentic evidence of human activity and experience through time

 

But what distinguishes archives from all other memory institutions is that the individual, organizational and collective memories they preserve are not defined primarily in terms of a  cultural heritage: they are situated on the evidential axis of the records continuum. Records embody the nexus between evidence, accountability, and memory.

 

Without  evidence  no  accountability  and  no  memory

 

Records serve as evidence of a transaction and records serve as evidence in an external corporate or individual memory. Both are evidence, with one side supporting accountability, the other

memory.

 

Changing societal expectations of the mission of the archivist in the 21st century are activated by the increasing irrelevance of constraints of place, time, and medium, made possible by modern information and communication technologies.

 

changing the archivist into an ICT-specialist. The archivist has to know how to use ICT but, more importantly, he or she has to understand the strategic implications for the archival

discipline of modern technologies and their impact on social and cultural practices.

 

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Being Digital means more than preserving and providing digital documents: it presents a techno-cultural challenge to connect archives with people (Ketelaar

 

Archivistics Being Digital

 

What are the implications for archival science of asociety  on  its  way  to  Being Digital?  I  will  distinguish  two developments  that  I  define  as digitization and memorialization.

 

Digitization: a paradigm shift in archival science

 

Structure is the logical  connection  between  the  elements  of  a document  (or  of  an  archive).  Form  is  the  outward appearance showing both the structure and the lay-

 

Digital records, have their content, structure and form in or on a physical medium, but in a digital representation, that serves as a generator for various ways in which the document is made visible

 

As David Levy writes: digital materials are made up of both the digital representation and the perceptible forms produced from it.

 

ensuring  the  technical  and  intellectual  survival  of  authentic  records  throughtime",  as  ISO  standard  15489  requires, is  enabling  the  reconstruction  of  the  content,  formand structure of a record through time.

 

The 'disappearance of the original' in a digital age makes for a major paradigm shift in archival science.

 

a digital document is a "mediated and ever- changing construction," as Terry Cook

 

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Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts and experiments fall intonew relationships one with the other (Kuhn

 

Memorialization: new challenges for archival science

 

Society as a whole,according to Pierre Nora, has acquired the religion of preservation and archivalization (Nora

 

The living histories of individuals and families form part of a larger framework, of local, regional, and national history, but also of the history and identity of political, religious and other social groups.

 

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Carnegie  Mellon  University  (Werkhoven  experiments in distributed memories The individual experience of different people from different locations can be synthesized into a collective experience."

 

Connecting private and public memories

 

I believe archival science might build on the widespread societal interest in memorialization and try to find out why and how individual memories can be connected with the memories of archival institutions, museums and libraries.

 

Archival science is challenged to attain "not only a more refined sense of what memory means in different contexts, but also a sensitivity to the differences between individual and social memory" (Hedstrom

 

 

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The records continuum model, developed by the Australian archival science scholars Frank Upward and Sue McKemmish, has four dimensions: records are created, then captured, thirdly organized The fourth dimension of recordkeeping is:  pluralizing: archives are brought "into  an  encompassing  framework  in  order  to  provide  a  collective  social,  historical  andcultural  memory  of the  institutionalized  social  purposes  and  roles  of  individuals  and corporate bodies"

 

"social and cultural mandates for essential evidence to function as collective memory".

 

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the model in a holistic way, embracing all dimensions. Archival science, therefore, is challenged to study the records continuum within the broader context of the memorialization of society.

 

In,  what  I  call,  "social  and cultural archivistics" we have to try to understand the role of records and documents in human affairs, we must try to recover the larger meanings of records and record-making (O'Toole 2002).

 

a "community of records" both  as  a  record- creating entity and as a memory frame that contextualizes the records it creates" (Bastian

 

Derrida saw all meaning as produced by a dual process of difference and deferral.

 

Content: "we also have to take the visitor or user into account, whose live gaze, as Andreas Huyssen remarks, endows the object with its aura (Huyssen Engel The globalization of archival science"

 

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Archival science has to be a comparative science, taking into account the different ways people make sense.

 

Your archival science does not need to be the same as my archival science (Ketelaar

 

Schellenberg there is "no final or ultimate definition of the term 'archives' thatmust  be  accepted  without  change  and  in preference  to  all  others.

 

Because of this, the  recent  ISO  standard  15489  refrains  from  a  definition  of  'archive'.

 

impact of different cultures on archival theory, methodology and practice,

 

Archival science can only flourish by careful study and by exchange and comparison of concepts, views and attitudes in different traditions (Ketelaar

 

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