DRAFT.

CHAPTER 3

 

the quest to integrate THE WORLD’S KNOWLEDGE: American ARCHIVAL ENGAGEMENT WITH THE DOCUMENTATION MOVEMENT, 1900-1950[i]

 

The story of American archives – is one to craze the historians, to amaze the lay-man, and to leave the law-maker unconcerned as ever … This country, which has so completely out-distanced other countries in the development of Library Science, is immeasurably behind them in all that pertains to archives.  In general our archives are neglected if not completely ignored.

-- Waldo Gifford Leland, 1912.[ii]

 

The International Congress of Libraries and Archives held in Brussels in 1910 is widely regarded as a seminal moment in the development of information science and yet its centrality to the development of archival science as well as the national and international interactions between archivists and the Documentation Movement out of which information science was to grow are less appreciated.  This chapter explores these early interactions and why they were abandoned, and also establishes historical context for documentary and metadata ideas that have been central in much of the subsequent discourse regarding archival descriptive standards and archival automation, digital libraries and archives development, cyberinfrastructure-building, and most recently, community-based archives and digital curation.

 

Introduction

We tend today to think that archival descriptive standards, integrated multimedia information systems that traverse national and disciplinary boundaries, effective management of administrative records being created in new formats, documentation strategies, and collaboration of archives, libraries and museums, are integrally tied to technological, intellectual, and professionals developments that have occurred over the past five decades.  In fact, these were all central preoccupations of visionary individuals convening as part of the Documentation Movement in Europe and the United States in a complex of international and interdisciplinary forums in the first half of the twentieth century just at the point when the American archival profession was beginning to organize.  While recording and information and communication technologies continued to generate new capacities for creating, managing and disseminating information of all kinds, the Documentation Movement faded in part because of the historical context in which it occurred -- international interactions between individuals and forums could not be sustained in the face of the devastation and disruptions caused by two world wars, economic depression, and the start of the Cold War.  However, professionalization of the information and cultural fields, reinforced by developments in graduate education and sometimes coupled with sentiments of national exceptionalism, also led to increasing emphasis on distinctive professional identities and roles and differences in philosophy and practices within different national contexts and traditions, thus creating increasing divisions between fields and jurisdictions.

 

Waldo Gifford Leland and the introduction of European ideas about archival arrangement and description into the United States

Waldo Gifford Leland was one of several remarkable men who were instrumental in the development of the archival profession in the United States in the first part of the Twentieth Century.  Among his many contributions to the field, Gifford was an important figure in early discussions about U.S. archival descriptive practices because of his role in introducing the ideas and principles being enunciated by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European archivists, librarians and documentalists to the nascent archival community in the United States.  Leland received his graduate degree in history from Harvard in 1901, and in 1903 began what was to be a twenty-year period working for the Bureau of Historical Research of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., which was directed from 1903 until 1928 by social historian and prominent advocate for a national archives, J. Franklin Jameson.[iii]   Compared to European countries, America was in a disadvantaged position in the first several decades of the twentieth century when Leland made his most important contributions, having no substantive archival tradition, no national archives, and no formal archival education programs.  The American Historical Association had been formed in 1884, followed, in 1895 by the formation of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, the Public Archives Commission in 1899, and, in 1909, the Conference of Archivists that itself would evolve, in 1936, into the Society of American Archivists.[iv]   This was a period when American historians such as Leland and Jameson,[v] in order to support the new academic field of American historical scholarship, were campaigning hard for a national archives and more robust archival repositories around the country.  They were also investing considerable efforts in developing documentary guides to archival materials dispersed across the country, as well as to materials relating to the colonial history and revolutionary struggles of America that were held in repositories in other nations such as England, France and Spain.  In trying to organize the profession, American historians looked to Europe not only for materials relevant to the history of the United States, but also for conceptual definitions and ideas about best practices for applying a scientific approach to the management of archival materials at home.[vi]

 

Through his work with the Carnegie Institution, Leland became intimately familiar with the development of guides for archival holdings.  The Guide to the Archives of the Government of the United States in Washington, which he coauthored with Claude Halstead Van Tyne, was published in 1904, and was subsequently revised and expanded by Leland in a new edition published in 1907.   He then traveled to repositories throughout the eastern United States to collect letters of Continental Congress delegates.  In 1903, when Leland undertook the Guide at Jameson’s behest, Jameson wrote to him with advice about how to go about doing such a survey:

My hope is that you and Van Tyne will prepare an archive report which shall not only surpass everything heretofore accomplished in that way in this country, but shall be a model of accurate workmanship and utility to historical students. I have two general suggestions which I venture to make now: First, that you should make every endeavor to find and read all the previous and partial surveys of the material … In the second place, archive reports in this country have really been made without any observation of the admirable archive reports common in Europe, where this sort of thing has been much more completely elaborated than with us. If you never had much occasion to use Langlois and Stein: Archives de l’Histoire de France, I advise you to make a thorough study of that book.  It is quite a model in its way.[vii]

 

Also in 1903, with a grant from the Carnegie Institution, Leland had begun to study European archival practice in French repositories.[viii]  His interaction with France continued from 1907 to 1914, and even included taking a course at the École des Chartes on archival theory and methods following the 1910 Congress, and then again from 1922 to 1927, when he served as the Carnegie Institution’s principal representative in that country.  He began work on what was to become a multivolume Guide to Materials for American History in the Libraries and Archives of Paris, the first two volumes of which were published in 1932 and 1943, respectively, with drafts of the remaining three forming part of Leland’s personal papers, which today are held by the Library of Congress.  He also directed the foreign copying program of the Library of Congress for French manuscripts relating to the United States, and started work on what became the institution’s two-volume Calendar of Manuscripts in Paris Archives and Libraries Relating to the History of the Mississippi Valley to 1803.[ix]

 

Most influentially for the development of archival arrangement and description in the United States, and undoubtedly himself influenced by the European archivists and librarians he had encountered in the course of his work in France as well as proponents of progressivism whom he had met in Washington, D.C.[x], Leland was persuaded against the application of bibliographically-oriented manuscript approaches to archival management. In his keynote address, “American Archival Problems,” presented at the First Conference of Archivists in 1909, he argued in favor of the principles articulated in 1898 by the Dutch archivists Muller, Feith and Fruin in their now famous Handleiding Voor Het Ordenen En Beschrijven Van Archieven or Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives. These principles, derived from the authors’ observations and experiences regarding the characteristics and properties of Dutch government records, included maintaining and describing the archival fonds as a whole, and preserving the original order of the materials in the fonds.[xi]

 

Leland did not question, however, the validity of applying principles thus derived to American records, even though there were significant differences in the recordkeeping practices between the United States and those of European countries, most notably, the absence of registry systems that would ensure the creation and maintenance of meaningful order of records of specific activities.  Archival historian Peter Wosh has recently argued that there were other problematic aspects to Leland’s championing of internationally-recognized best practices. In particular, he has argued that the promotion of objective standards and shared principles that today might appear to be unexceptional, created a new and narrow orthodoxy in American archival practices that excluded the history and experiences of minority groups and cultures and disparaged inferior repositories and individuals, especially those of the south that were addressing Confederate and African American history.[xii]  As a result, the newly formed Society of American Archivists was very homogeneous and diversity largely disappeared.[xiii]  Separate documentation movements that could validly be considered the precursors of the documentation strategy approach proposed in the 1980s, emerged, especially in relation to African American and Afro-Latin history.[xiv]   Such a critique presages a well-recognized issue that contemporary metadata standards developers face in devising universal descriptive schemes, that is, how to balance the precision and prescriptiveness required to ensure consistency and quality control in descriptive practices and facilitate data exchange between different parties with the toleration or inclusion of alternate cultural practices and understandings and specific community needs that are necessary to support diverse creators and users.

 

1910 International Congress of Libraries and Archives

It was Jameson who personally introduced Leland to the Belgian archivists, also in 1909.[xv]  In 1910, Leland was one of four representatives of the American Historical Association who attended (at their own expense) an historic first meeting of European and American archivists at the International Congress of Libraries and Archives.[xvi]  The Congress was a very grand affair held in Brussels during the World’s Fair and organized by the International Institute for Bibliography or IIB and the presence of Americans surprised some. [xvii]  In his draft report for the AHA, Leland remarked that:

One of the officials attending the congress … said, “But I thought there were no archives in America.” He was told that there were indeed archives in America, but that these men were [there] due mainly to the benevolence of Providence, and not to the sagacity and foresight of government.[xviii]

In his brief talk at the Congress, Leland discussed the nascent and disparate state of archives in the United States, and his work on the survey of the states.  He expressed the hope that the situation would be better systematized in ten years.[xix]  He also mentioned his 1909 speech at the first Conference of Archivists where, at his urging, it had been agreed that American archivists should look to implement European methods and practices.[xx]  He later noted in a letter to his wife that he had “got a great many ideas” at the Congress.[xxi]

 

Dunbar Rowland, Director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, another of the American attendees at the 1910 Congress, in his presentation entitled “The Importance of the Concentration and Classification of National Archives,” provided some more insight for the European attendees into American thinking and the clear desire of U.S. archives to be part of an international uniform initiative:

… it is for us at the beginning of the twentieth century to seriously direct our attention to the duty of making national archives more accessible and more usable.  There is an impetus in that direction, and it is very gratifying to think that the present century may be marked by the adoption of a great international plan for the concentration and classification of public archives.”[xxii]

It was clear that he envisaged an initiative to develop a “uniform method of classification” would be European-led:

… careless and unscientific methods prevail in the United States, and an acknowledgment of this fact relieves us of the imputation that we come to you as advice-givers … we wish, by the confession of our own short-comings, to emphasize our interest in any progress on this side which will enable us to solve the archive problems on our side of the water.[xxiii]

Interestingly, when Dunbar Rowland had previously written to Jameson seeking background data on European practices for his paper, Jameson had responded that he did,

not know of any book that in which the subject is comprehensively treated, except one in Swedish and one in Dutch, and I do not know that you read these languages … I have here, however, a German translation of the Dutch one – Anteilung zum Orden und Beschreiben von Archiven by Muller, Feith and Fruin, translated by Kaiser – and will cheerfully lend it to you if it will be useful, although, being rather the standard book, its facts will be pretty well known to your audience.[xxiv]

 

The Brussels Congress was promoted by the Association des Archivistes et Bibliothécaires Belges [Association of Belgian Archivists and Librarians] founded by Joseph Cuvelier at the turn of the century in Brussels.  Cuvelier, who had published extensively on classification of fonds and publication of finding aids, was also particularly interested in the role of archival education in preparing archivists in the more technical aspects of archival practice.  As Secretary of the Congress, he was influential in determining the content of the Brussels discussion, which focused, therefore, on the development of archival education in countries with no existing formal programs.  The keystone of the system of Belgian archival education, which Cuvelier believed to be exceptionally rigorous, was its Cours Practique d'Archivéconomie, which included the new science of arrangement and description delineated by Muller, Feith and Fruin’s Manual.  The Manual had been translated from Dutch into French in the same year as the Brussels Congress by Cuvelier, and Henri Stein, of the Archives Nationales in Paris.  Muller, Fruin and Stein were all in attendance at the 1910 Congress, and the concept of provenance advocated by the manual was adopted as “the basic rule” of the profession[xxv] and formally endorsed by the Congress.[xxvi]

 

The background of the Dutch Manual (as it came to be known), and its subsequent widespread adoption, is well known today.  It was produced for the Dutch Association of Archivists, in cooperation with the State Archives of the Netherlands and the Ministry of the Interior.  It drew predominantly on the kinds of records found in Dutch archives with the aim of trying to develop a single methodology that could be used to try to standardize arrangement and description across Dutch archives and historical collections and support Dutch colonial infrastructure.[xxvii]   It was also influenced by French archival theory as a result of Muller’s 1873 attendance at the École des chartes in Paris, as well as the adoption by some Dutch archives of the Prussian concept of provenance.[xxviii] For the first time, a text clearly and concisely delineated and elaborated upon concepts and principles of archival arrangement and description such as respect des fonds and provenance that had been progressively institutionalized and codified through a series of regulations and manuals as bureaucratic practices and the national historical consciousness of European nation states evolved.[xxix]   According to Theodore Schellenberg, the Dutch Manual was fast adopted as the “bible for modern archivists,” and over the next two decades was translated and published in countries across Europe. The Dutch Manual was finally published in the United States in 1940, coinciding with the initiation of the first recurring course in the History and Administration of Archives, taught by Germany émigré and former Prussian State archivist Ernst Posner at American University in Washington, D.C..

 

The IIB and the Documentation Movement

Although most librarians and library scholars with any background in library classification history and theory would probably be familiar with the Documentation Movement centered in Belgium around the turn of the Twentieth Century, and the ferment of ideas surrounding the development of cataloging and classification schemes that characterized that period, its relationship to the archival field at the time is less well known.[xxx] For archivists, one of the most interesting aspects of the Documentalist or Documentation Movement was that it was inclusive of archival ideas and principles, as well as those of library, museum, bureaucratic, and other documentation practices. The movement’s founders, prominent lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri-Marie Lafontaine, sought to develop a classification scheme that would serve as the architecture for a master bibliography of the world’s accumulated knowledge in all documentary forms, regardless of its professional context, and also support the goals of social democracy and pacifism that were prevalent among intellectuals in Belgium and elsewhere at the time. According to W. Boyd Rayward, a scholar of classification history,

The collaboration between the two founders began in the early 1890's. In 1893 they transformed the bibliographical section of the Société des études sociales et politiques, in which they were both active, into an International Institute of Sociological Bibliography. The following year Otlet obtained a copy of Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification and in March 1895 he wrote to Dewey seeking permission to translate the classification and to use it for bibliographical purposes.[xxxi]

Otlet subsequently created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification, and in 1913, Lafontaine received the Nobel Prize for Peace for his work with the International Peace Bureau.[xxxii]

 

The International Institute for Bibliography (IIB), which was to undergo several subsequent renamings until it eventually became the International Federation for Information and Documentation-FID, was established in Brussels by the International Conference on Bibliography in 1895.  The International Conference met in Brussels from September 2-5 in order to “study matters of classification and the international organisation of bibliography generally.”[xxxiii]  In the same decade that the IIB was established, several archival treatises were published in Europe,[xxxiv] the most influential being Muller, Feith and Fruin’s Manual regarding the arrangement and description of archival material, a subject in which Otlet became greatly interested.[xxxv]   Prior to the International Congress of Librarians and Archivists in July 1910, Otlet had participated in the Congress for Administrative Sciences also held in Brussels.  According to Rayward:

[Otlet] regarded its work as primarily documentary, administrative documentation being a subject of long-standing interest to him.  As President of the Congress’s section for documentation, he had … assembled an enormous documentary exhibit.[xxxvi]

The scope of the documentalist perspective on administrative documentation in many ways presaged ideas about the integration of recordkeeping functions, activities and practices that were not fully expressed within the archival community until the development of the records continuum in the 1990s:[xxxvii]

By far the greatest number of resolutions taken by this congress dealt with documentation … It was resolved that “all the theoretical and practical knowledge relating to general documentation should be brought together and co-ordinated” … [and] that “there should be a general method for administrative documentation.  This method should embrace the various operations to which documents are submitted (creation, conservation, classification, communication, publication, retirement, transferral to archival depots).”[xxxviii]

Otlet visited America in early 1914 and received some expression of interest from the Secretary of State.  However, U.S. participation would have required the country joining the Union of International Associations (UIA), the research institute and documentation center founded in 1907 in Brussels by Lafontaine and Otlet, which was not possible since the United States Government could only belong to organizations formed by official conventions.[xxxix]  According to Otlet, “The United States Government would gladly consider supporting ‘any international agreement which the governments supporting these organisations may agree on.’”[xl]   There was, of course, no time to pursue these matters for the First World War swiftly enveloped Europe.

 

As historian of information science Michael Buckland has noted, the term “documentation” was increasingly accepted from about 1920 onward as generically encompassing “bibliography, scholarly information services, records management, and archival work.”[xli]   It is not surprising, therefore, that Leland wrote to Otlet in 1925, stating his deep interest in the IIB and the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation with which it was associated in various ways, and advising him that an American Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was to be formed at a conference to be held in March 1925.  He also asked for more information about the status and work of the IIB, and, sending his regards to Senator Lafontaine, said that he hoped to see Otlet when he visited Brussels in May.[xlii]  In his response, Otlet included a plea to the Americans that essentially spoke of the need to reverse the past flow of influence from Europe to the United States, drawing upon American cooperative impetus, expansive thinking and energy.[xliii] Such American leadership did not occur until the second half of the twentieth century, however, when staff of the young U.S. National Archives pushed for the formation of the International Council on Archives following World War II, and later still in the form of American-developed information and communications technologies, as well as extensive federal support for research and development of cyberinfrastructure and digital libraries.

 

The archival legacy of the 1910 Congress of Librarians and Archivists

A decade after the 1910 Congress, a report at the 25^th Annual Meeting of the AHA relating to the work of the Public Archives Commission stated that: “the Commission has been able, through participation in the Congress of Archivists in Brussels and through the annual conferences of archivists which it initiated in 1909 to inculcate and encourage in this country the best methods of archive administration.”[xliv] The future of the international movement that brought together archivists, librarians, and documentalists was never secured, however.  While a permanent committee had been established with the aim of holding international congresses every five years, a second congress of librarians and archivists never occurred because of the outbreak of World War I.  Disillusionment followed the war.  The growing and increasingly territorial information and cultural professions that had come together across nations in the documentation movement around notions of universality of description, integration of types of information resources, and the potential of new technologies moved apart and became more distinct in their specializations, more reified, and more nationally based.[xlv]  At the international level, the formation first of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), and then, after World War II, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Council on Archives, while they served as umbrella organizations to bring their members together across international lines, reinforced the silos that were developing between the different professional areas and interests.

 

While documentalists might have lost their international focus between the two World Wars, archivists remained understandably preoccupied with international issues. Foremost among their concerns was how to recover and make available records that had been displaced.  This involved both international cooperation and contemplation of common methods of arrangement and description.  Solon J. Buck, arguing in 1946 in his role as U.S. National Archivist in favor of creating an archives as part of the newly formed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), noted the shift to archival concerns.  He wrote that the legacy of the 1910 Congress was that “subsequently the librarians withdrew from the committee, which then continued its existence only to represent the archivists. Plans were several times made for an international congress of archivists, the last time for one to be held in Italy in 1935, but it was not possible to bring any of these to fruition.”[xlvi]   Buck mentions a third effort for international cooperation among archivists that also had its roots in the 1910 Congress and was underway at the time of his writing:

The Technical Committee of Archivists [was] set up in 1931 by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, the operating agency of the League of Nations’ International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation.  This was to be a sort of advisory board of archival experts from different countries, which was to meet annually to draw up resolutions and plans for presentation to the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation … It studied such questions as the international exchange of photographic facsimiles, the standardization of archival terminology, the durability of modern types of records, and the archivists’ concern with motion-picture film … The fate of this committee is bound up with that of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation and probably lies now in the hands of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.[xlvii]

Noting how the FID had “given much attention to archives as an important phase of the larger subject of documentation,” Buck expressed his hope that the FID’s first post-war conference in Paris in November 1946 would align with the activities and interests of the young UNESCO.[xlviii]  Leland attended that meeting in Paris (the 16^th International Documentation Conference) as a representative of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).  Final resolutions at that Conference expressed a strong desire to work closely with UNESCO, for cooperation with ISO on the standardization of documents, and for FID to remain in charge of the development of Universal Decimal Classification. A final recommendation called for training in documentation to be developed in educational institutions; it was assumed that this was particularly directed at a role that UNESCO might play (and later did in archival education).[xlix]

 

The American Documentation Institute

While the documentation movement was in decline in Europe between the two World Wars, it was on the rise in the United States.  Perhaps even less well known than American archival involvement with the IIB/FID was the role that U.S. National Archives staff and SAA members played in the early days of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), the organization that was eventually to evolve into today’s American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T).

 

In 1937, Buck attended “by invitation, a conference on documentation under the auspices of Science Service, at which a resolution was adopted favoring the organization of a Documentation Institute and requesting the chairman of the meeting, Mr. Watson Davis, to arrange for a meeting of delegates from national scholarly agencies to bring about such an organization”.[l] Watson Davis, the visionary behind the American Documentation Institute, was director of Science Service, a not-for-profit institution founded in 1921 to increase and improve the public dissemination of scientific and technical information. Science Service had sponsored early innovation in microphotography and also established a Documentation Division and a Bibliofilm Service.[li]  In 1935, it had set up the Documentation Institute.

 

Science Service’s trustees were nominated by the National Academy of Sciences (where the Science Service was housed), the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the E.W. Scripps Estate—many of the same bodies that have pushed for the recent development of cyberinfrastructure to support digital scholarship.  In the 1920s, Davis had begun to wonder whether it would be possible to develop “some method for putting books and manuscripts into compact and portable form by some miniaturephotographic process similar to motion picture films.”[lii]  He became a major proponent of microfilm for revolutionizing the management of data and information, promoting it in terms that reverberate with much of the enthusiasm we have seen in recent years from proponents of emergent digital information technologies:

One of the newer and most promising tools of documentation is the microfilm.  Compact, to an extraordinary degree, promising to outlast our omnipresent paper, and capable of reproducing anything the eye can see, even in natural colors, microfilms promise to hurdle some of the present barriers to easy and effective interchange of intelligence in many fields.[liii]

As a reporter, Watson Davis had encountered how Europeans were talking about documents and documentation and also wanted to bring those ideas to America, noting that, “‘documentation’ is being used because it includes all phases of issuance, use and interchange of recorded information.”[liv]

Buck served as the representative of the National Archives on the organizing committee meeting to establish the American Documentation Institute, held March 13, 1937, a meeting that he also chaired.[lv] He was elected a trustee and treasurer of the new organization, and served along with Watson Davis and Ludvig Hektoen as one of the three incorporators.  On November 1, 1937, after Davis, the president of the Institute, requested that the Archivist nominate a member for the permanent organization, Connor again nominated Buck, and at the annual meeting of the Institute, on January 27, 1938, Buck was formally elected a member of the permanent organization for three years, and reelected a trustee.  Buck later informed Connor that “Dr. Tate and Dr. Schellenberg, of the staff of the National Archives are also members of the Institute, having been elected on the nomination of the Society of American Archivists and the American Historical Association respectively.”[lvi]  Vernon Tate was also an active member of the American Library Association’s Committee on Photographic Reproduction of Library Materials and became editor of the Journal of Documentary Reproduction that was published by that committee between 1938 and 1943.

By Summer 1937, announcements about the formation of the American Documentation Institute were carried by many major scientific journals and newsletters, acknowledging a growing recognition at the highest levels of government, academia and information institutions that developments in scholarly and scientific methods in multiple disciplines and sectors, as well as developments in new information and reproduction technologies required the support of new and integrated approaches to information and documentary practices.  The first World Congress of Universal Documentation was held in Paris in August of that same year, with Davis representing the ADI.  Other attendees included Hilary Jenkinson from the British Public Record Office, Lodewyk Bendikson, Head of Photographic Reproduction at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Paul Otlet, Suzanne Briet, Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, and H.G. Wells.  Michael Buckland speculates that this constituted a temporary convergence between diverse parties primarily driven by a shared interest in emergent technology (then photographic reproduction, which dominated early twentieth century technological developments prior to computing) and possibly, to a much lesser extent forensic analysis of documents.   It was likely much less driven by “conceptual insights into theoretical affinities, let alone amicable professional convergence.”[lvii]  He further speculates that based on this precedent, one would expect a reiteration of archive-library convergence around digital technology but that this will also prove to be transitory in terms of perceived professional affinity, unless the technology inhibits professional divergence.[lviii]

 

Among the resolutions of the 1937 World Congress was one calling for microfilm copying services to be established by libraries around the world to facilitate scholarly access to their holdings.  The new ADI’s Auxiliary Publications Program provided services quite similar to those of today’s pre-print servers and digital repositories.  Organized by the participating scientific and professional societies, foundations and government agencies, it facilitated the publication and distribution of scholarly papers in the sciences and social sciences that were too long or too complex to publish by traditional means.  Instead, a journal could publish an abstract of a paper and include a note that contained an ADI number whereby readers could get the entire paper, figures, tables or images, or the associated research data, for a fee.[lix]  As one academic commentator observed, “In this way the document is perpetually ‘in print,’ but no extensive, space-consuming stocks need be stored – only the document itself and the microfilm negative from which positives are made for distribution.”[lx]

 

While some of this momentum and coordination was interrupted by World War II, support for the war effort and then coping with its vast and complex documentary aftermath and fears that an atomic strike could result in widespread obliteration of documentation promoted the implementation of state-of-the-art information technologies and the development of new approaches for managing high volumes of increasingly multimedia documentary materials.  The fledgling ADI did not grow until after the war, but its leadership during this period moved between different documentary fields.  Watson Davis served as president until 1944 when Keyes Metcalf, Librarian of Harvard succeeded him.  Waldo Gifford Leland served as president in 1945.  Watson Davis served again in 1946.  By 1947, the FID was reconstituting itself after the war and was agitating, as had Otlet between the wars, for Americans to play an active part in the future development of the FID.  It requested an American representative for its council.[lxi]  Responding to this request, the American Library Association and the ADI together funded Vernon Tate of the National Archives to attend the 1949 FID meeting in Bern, Switzerland where the ADI was officially recognized as representing the United States within the FID.  Tate went on to serve as president of the ADI in 1949 and also as the first editor in 1951 and 1952 of the ADI journal American Documentation, that was to go on to become the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

 

Helen L. Chatfield, a records officer with the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, reviewed the American Documentation’s first issue for the American Archivist and was obviously quite familiar with the documentalists and the work of Otlet and Lafontaine.  She remarked that their definition of “documentation” as referring to “the creation, transmission, collection, classification and use of documents,” the latter being defined as “recorded knowledge in any format” was “novel” in the American context. She also references a talk given in 1946 at the U.S. National Archives by F. Donker-Duyvuis Secretary of the Dutch Institute of Documentation.[lxii]  More significantly, Chatfield discusses the concerns among documentalists, especially American documentalists, about the efficacy and applicability of the Universal Decimal Classification and FID’s sponsorship of it, remarking that:

It is not surprising that the American Chapter turned rather to the development of improved methods than to the idea of a standard classification as a means of accomplishing its aims, since the interest of its founders in the broad field of documentation had sprung from an earlier preoccupation with the techniques of reproduction.[lxiii]

Her review ends, nevertheless, with an endorsement of the documentalist approach and a strong exhortation for archivists and librarians to work together more closely:

… At this point the thoughtful archivist will give pause to consider his relation to the new development.  Are record documents included in the material to be worked on? – and who are the “documentalists?” … Surely record documents are included, as well as library material, and both the archivist and the librarian are “documentalists.”  With the growing need for a job to be done in the social science field comparable to what had already been achieved for the physical sciences, it is important that documentalists work together.  Although the librarian and the archivist have many interests in common, each has lived too long in a world apart with too little understanding of the work of the other.  Perhaps in this common activity of documentation a way will be found to bring them together.[lxiv]

 

In spite of their early support, however, Americans did not continue to be active participants in FID, possibly because the ADI was more interested in methods, and in particular in microfilm, then they were in the bibliographic and classification preoccupations of FID.  The need to respond to World War II and its aftermath, as well as to tackle the prior uncontrolled accumulation of records from World War I and Depression-era projects led the National Archives to delve into records management approaches, to articulate appraisal criteria and to delineate internal descriptive practices.  On a side note, this was also the period when the National Archives began to grapple with the archival implications of other media -- sound and film recordings.  In 1949, the National Archives was subsumed under the General Services Administration, in large part due to its emphasis on records management and efficiency in record-keeping.  At that point, the National Archives’ engagement in the documentation movement largely ceased and since then it has never played a leadership role in the field of information science.  Similarly, while the Society of American Archivists developed close ties with related professional organizations such as the Association for Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) and the American Library Association (ALA), they have never developed the same strength of relationship with the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST).

 

What them became of the ADI? In the early 1950s, it became a membership-based organization and moved away from being an organization of delegates appointed from among affiliated scientific and professional societies, foundations and government agencies.[lxv]  As previously stated, the emerging field of information science took over much of the legacy of the documentation movement.  Reacting to the difficulties for American scholars in accessing foreign research materials during and after World War II, as well as the destruction of many of those materials, American research libraries put together the Farmington Plan.  A major cooperative microfilm acquisitions initiative between 1942 and 1972 that was initially sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and subsequently led by Harvard Library, the Farmington Plan sought to ensure access to research materials and publications by region and subject regardless of war or other events around the world.  Among those involved in the plan was, not surprisingly, Waldo Gifford Leland.  Ralph Wagner has pointed out several logistical, market, and institutional competition issues that impeded the plan’s overall success.  One of his conclusions, however, points to some of the key differences between library and archival fortes and perspectives about the centrality and future value of unpublished primary sources, as opposed to contemporarily important published materials and begs the question of whether the outcome might have been different if the Farmington Plan had been a collaborative initiative of librarians and archivists:

[T]he Farmington Plan’s failure was almost dictated by the nature of its central concern. Marginal library materials are and will remain politically marginal. They are the concern of scholars working in obscure fields, who are unlikely to unite in support of a concept of collecting the marginal. They are today’s legacy to tomorrow’s scholars, whose assessment of them may be dramatically different, but who have no voice in today’s decisions.[lxvi]

 

One other interesting debate that emerged in the early 1950s surrounded the nature of professional education for documentalists.  Of what should it consist and could it be contained within library schools?  In the end, most library schools became schools of library and information science and developed specialized courses in information science in addition to those in library science.  A few library schools also offered a course or two in archival administration, but it wasn’t until the 1990s and later that substantial numbers of schools began to offer significant archival concentrations and even more recently before graduate or continuing archival education began to offer substantial education in digital aspects of archival practice.[lxvii]  Perhaps the idea of an integrated education to prepare “documentation specialists” able to bridge different types of documentation and different disciplinary fields and their information practices was one that came before its time, and is only now being realized in the possibilities afforded by the iSchool movement.[lxviii]

 

In 1962, just when the first social science data archives were being established and large bureaucracies were beginning to implement mainframe-based administrative data processing systems, and six years before the American library field was to begin machine-readable cataloging, Watson Davis gave an address to the American Documentation Institute titled “Documentation Unfinished.”  In his presentation he reviewed several areas of interest that had informed his work, all of which are central to scholarly information management today. Among them were developing: “one big library” through a cooperative “net” particularly with the use of microfilming; auxiliary publishing by means of film, as a “medium for keeping the record of science simultaneously complete, inexpensive, up-to-date, and personalized;” and building on  H.G. Wells’ idea of the “World Brain.” [lxix]  With regards to this last theme, Davis concluded:

Organizing the knowledge of the world is still the prime need that could be filled by documentation . . . The great computer and information systems, added to advanced microfilm, developed in recent years makes this more technically possible . . . Shall we read the plans of past decades and then proceed to build them with the tools that were not then fashioned?[lxx]

 

Final thoughts

For archivists today, there are several intriguing aspects of the early documentation movement that are also relevant their increasingly technologized and global field.

Imbued with modernist and millennialist ideas about standardization and universalism that emanated out of global changes that were occurring as a result of new technologies, industrialization and the accelerated speed of communication and travel, the work of the International Institute of Bibliography in the first half of the twentieth century marked the first attempt to develop a universal classification scheme that was inclusive of archival ideas and principles.  There was also unprecedented interaction among the various players, including leading archivists, librarians and museum professionals across Europe and the United States, and considerable instrumentality on the part of the independent research institute, the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington.  This interaction culminated with the establishment after World War II of UNESCO in 1945-46 and then of the International Council of Museums in 1946 and the International Council on Archives (ICA) in 1948—perhaps its most concrete and enduring outcome.

 

After the 1940s, U.S. international archival involvement declined dramatically until the late 1980s, in part due to the withdrawal from national and international leadership of the National Archives while it was under the General Services Administration and in part due to the United States’ boycott of UNESCO between 1984 and 2002.[lxxi] At the same time, the National Archives withdrew from its involvement in the ADI and as a result the young fields of archival and information science took divergent courses.

 

It is only in recent years that American archivists have re-connected with the international archival and documentation communities and started learning from and contributing to them, in effect picking up the agenda that was dropped in the 1940s.   Here again it was a confluence of technological, ideological, professional and logistical factors that encouraged this reconnection.  As described in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, concomitant with the development of the Internet, there was an upsurge in the development of archival descriptive standards and bibliographic utilities that would bring consistency to national practices and that could also support international data exchange.  Since the early 1980s, archivists have come together with bibliographic description and other information experts in national and international groups to work on the development and implementation of descriptive formats, frameworks, and data models such as MARC Archival and Manuscripts Control (AMC), FRBR and RDF, and with other archivists and recordkeeping professionals to develop Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and the suite of International Council on Archives standards based around the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD (G)), and ISO records management standards.  One important additional factor that led to an increase in international and cross-disciplinary cooperation was the availability of funding for international research relating to the management of digital records, resulting in ground-breaking initiatives such as the InterPARES and CAMiLEON Projects.  The imperative to address digital records issues, coupled with growing uptake of a continuum-based approach to recordkeeping, have also served to bring the records management and archival professions much closer together than they have been since they parted company in the 1950s.

 

Possibly most intriguing for archivists to contemplate is the birthing of an archival descriptive standardization movement that had its roots in European government administrative practices and national history-making and yet was closely associated with a universal classification movement that was strongly vested in the ideals of social democracy and pacifism. The widespread legacy of the Dutch Manual can be seen today in the principles that continue to be central to the archival paradigm around the world and to the ISAD (G) suite.  The goal of integrating the world’s information resources, however, has become largely the province of those engaged in digital library and cyberinfrastructure development, inspired less by the work of the IIB and more by Vannevar Bush’s iconic, although in many ways considerably less innovative, vision in 1945 of the Memex machine, a mechanized annotatable hypertext storage and retrieval system for the world’s knowledge.[lxxii]  Nevertheless, the work of Otlet and Lafontaine and the unprecedented dialogue between European and American archivists and other information and heritage professionals presaged the development since the 1990s of the ever-growing, constantly evolving universe of metadata standards as well as of multi-content and transdisciplinary digital libraries and archives.

 

The global potential of this development is only really now starting to become a reality, made both possible and necessary by developments in information technologies and fueled by a renewed desire in light of those technologies to integrate the world’s knowledge. However, there are some valuable lessons that the archival field can learn from the experiences of the first half of the twentieth century.   The first is never to lose sight of the importance of identifying and pursuing a grand vision.  It is very easy to become bogged down in technological and implementation details, processing backlogs and policy wrangling, but at the end of the day archivists should be seeking to contribute more to the world than simply trying to stay afloat in a sea of change.  The second is to acknowledge the power of individual initiative and leadership in catalyzing change and, as individuals, to be prepared to exercise both when and where they are necessary.  At the same time, however, one should always be cognizant of the socio-political context that is shaping that individual’s approach to initiative and leadership.  The third is to be sure that support for a vision or initiative is also nurtured at the ground-level and that new ideas are not in danger of being regarded as too top-down or abstracted from application—otherwise they might not survive changes in leadership or in political or economic climate.  The fourth is never to underestimate the relevance of international engagement—narrow institutional and national foci limit the innovation and problem-solving capacity of the archival field, as well as its awareness of cultural difference and key issues that traverse institutional, sector, and national boundaries.  The fifth builds upon this, and that is to maintain an awareness that internationalization should not necessarily mean homogenization.  It is easy to lose sight of the intellectual lineage of one’s own practices, or of the cultural biases within practices that one exports elsewhere, as well as to lose important nuances in local applications through the desire to conform to wider standards.  Finally, while it is always important to have conceptual understandings, tools and practices that are appropriate to one’s professional role and mission, too much emphasis on professional differentiation and distinctiveness can make it very difficult to work across professional divides to devise the most effective solutions to common problems and work towards integration of the world’s knowledge.