Annotation Summary for: Ketelaar 2004
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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].
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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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