Archives and the Knowledge Commons

The recent efforts to consider knowledge as a commons, something shared by a group of people and challenged by social dilemmas, is a topic archivists need to examine. The volume edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), is a good place to start. The essays in this volume are grouped by studying the knowledge commons, protecting the knowledge commons, and building the knowledge commons. And the volume brings together a group of leading researchers and proponents of this concept – including Hess and Ostrom, David Bollier, James Boyle, and Donald Waters – commenting on new standards and initiatives such as the Open Archive Initiative, MIT Dspace, digital libraries, and so forth.

My purpose here is to provide some examples from this volume that ought to encourage individuals to reconsider archives as a potential part of the knowledge commons. For example, Nancy Kranich writes, “Digital age information-sharing initiatives, or knowledge commons, allow scholars to reclaim their intellectual assets and fulfill critical roles – the advancement of knowledge, innovation, and creativity through democratic participation in the free and open creation and exchange of ideas. Understanding knowledge as a commons offers a way not only of countering the challenges of access posed by enclosure, but of building a fundamental institution for twenty-first century democracy” (p. 93). It should be obvious that archives could be comfortably placed in this knowledge commons, although they are not (when archives are mentioned they are usually associated with the printed journals and books, not other kinds of archival sources).

Don Waters, a name that will be familiar to many archivists, provides another view about preserving the knowledge commons, indicating, “when scholars use systems of reference to link one work to another, they establish and exercise underlying fabrics of trust. These fabrics serve to tie researchers to other researchers, teachers to students, and creators to users over time and place into durable and productive scholarly communities. The linked works represent the common pools of knowledge – the knowledge commons – over which members of the communities labor to produce new knowledge. The links work, the trust endures, and the commons nourishes the intellectual life only when the reader is able to check the reference at the other end, and that checking depends on a reliable, ongoing system of preserving the knowledge commons” (p. 146). There is certainly no problem in connecting archives into this, especially given how often archival sources are cited; yet, it is surprising that generally such commentaries are considering the print literature and not the documentary heritage in the form of manuscripts, photographs, printed ephemera, and other documentary forms located in archives.

One of the more interesting commentaries comes from Peter Levine in discussing the knowledge commons and community projects. Levine writes, “Academics are strongly influenced by policies regarding funding, hiring, promotion, and tenure. Often universities that compete internationally for academic prominence do not reward applied research – let alone service – despite rhetoric to the contrary” (p. 261). Levine adds, “Fortunately, universities do reward scholars who break new ground in their disciplines by working with communities. Thus is a strategy of using community engagement to achieve genuine scholarly insight is better suited to the existing academic marketplace than a strategy based on ‘service’” (p. 263). For professors of archival studies and university archivists seeking to break ground into their communities, such sentiments must seem encouraging. Indeed, Levine provides some insights into the value of connecting with the local community that mirrors what some archivists on the local level have done: “While there is value to the very low-cost products that we see on the Internet (personal web pages, e-mail lists, and blogs), we also need fairly expansive and elaborate products, such as moderated deliberations, maps linked to databases, streaming videos, online newspapers with original reporting, historical archives, and photo essays – to name just a few. Young people can contribute such products, thus exercising their creativity in the public interest. This is especially important since many young people are otherwise alienated from public and civic life” (p 268).

So, my question is, are any archivists playing with the idea of the knowledge commons? Certainly, archivists understand the need for them to consider how information (elevated into evidence and knowledge) builds community. However, is anyone within this professional group using this broader concept to present their role within society and scholarly communities?

The Demise of Our Cultural Rights (and Cultural Heritage?)

“Our scattershot cultural policy has failed to balance the public interest with the marketplace,” writes Bill Ivey in his Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, carefully follows the growing corporate ownership of our documentary heritage, creative arts, and art of lasting value (like classical music) and the fading cultural and other institutions that collect and care for them. Adding to the growing literature about intellectual property, most of it quite pessimistic, Ivey also spends considerable energy considering the cultural heritage, a topic that will be of interest to archivists.

Early on, Ivey notes that “early archives” were often “labors of love created by devoted fans of history and art” but now “it’s business” (p. 35). Much of the author’s attention is devoted to what corporations have done to our documentary heritage, and Ivey generally doesn’t pull any punches. Writing about music archives in the recording industry, Ivey believes that these archives are maintained by “low-level employees” unaware of the importance of what they have in their custody (p. 41). Expanding his perspective beyond this part of our cultural heritage, Ivey writes, “Most of America’s twentieth-century culture was produced by for-profit arts industries, and much of our cultural heritage has been no better treated than assets such as buildings and furniture” (p. 45) The non-profit organizations administering these archives also have struggled: “our under funded public and private archives have struggled to keep up with expanding collections, expensive technologies, and an increasingly burdensome intellectual property environment” (p. 45). Ivey notes that these archival programs have had particular difficulty dealing with the “intangible heritage,” the sounds, images, tapes, and films that are a critical part of our documentary heritage, and all parts of the heritage most often targeted by for-profits in terms of their controlling intellectual property.

One of the more interesting points Ivey makes is that the media industries are against the notion of preservation, according to him, because they fear a public backlash: “By revealing how much has been lost, how much has never been released, and, following decades of mergers and relocations, just how little record, film, and television companies know about what they do or do not own, the truth would produce public outrage” (p. 48). The source of this problem or approach is because the “preservation strategy” is “based on current market value. The result is at best a leaky sieve. Some treasures are saved, but others are mislaid, poorly stored, or locked up in service to profit” (p. 55). What makes this worse is that the nonprofit repositories have adopted the same approach: “Nonprofits are too often careless with historical assets, risk averse, and too often drawn to projects that have no real importance beyond an impact on the bottom line” (p. 217). As Ivey argues, this just is not going to work (at least if we concerned about the public good).

The warning in this book is that as the costs of getting access to and using the documents of our cultural heritage increase, we will see more of a “cultural divide.” “This cultural divide results in part from the scope of our current technological revolution,” Ivey argues, “but it has been exacerbated by business practices that shape both the production and the distribution of art products and by the introduction of high-end software programs that greatly expand the horizons of those affluent consumers who can buy in at the highest level” (p. 278). We now have a “growing, high-priced permission culture,” and to illustrate this point, Ivey puts in the costs involved in reproducing images in his book (and some of these costs are surprisingly high). Ivey does not write a gloomy assessment, but proposes a long list of actions that must or should be taken. Some strike me as idealistic, but his call for action and resistance is something archivists ought to read and reflect on. While professional associations, such as the Society of American Archivists, have been pretty good in issuing statements about some of these matters and even presenting testimony in Congressional hearings when needed, the real difficult task ahead is how individual archivists and archival programs are going to deal with the practical consequences of this commercialization of our heritage. And here there are no simple answers.

History Lessons

Mary Lefkowitz, the classicist who took on the Afro-centrists (arguing that the Greeks stole their philosophy and other knowledge from Africa) has written a very personal account of her life and academic career as a result of her involvement in this controversy in History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). I read the book because so much of this controversy focused on the nature of historical evidence and the interpretation of ancient history. However, this book is really more about the nature of academic freedom and the culture wars in the university in the 1990s. If one wants more of the substance of the debate about the use of historical sources versus memory, mythology, and present social and political agendas, a reading of her 1996 Not Out of Africa is the place to go. However, this new book is a fascinating additional source about the controversy, similar in tone and spirit to the personal account Deborah Lipstadt wrote about her experiences in the David Irving libel trial regarding her own work on the Holocaust deniers. One senses the surprise by which Lefkowitz discovers that academic freedom, postmodernism, race, and politics make for strange bedfellows. Early on she writes, “Telling the truth, instead of being our first responsibility, had suddenly become less important than achieving social goals” (p. 2). Also less important, according to Lefkowitz, is the responsibility that college and university administrators feel they have to promote civil discourse, the debate about ideas, and the defense of faculty who are attacked because of criticism they offer of certain ideas about and approaches to scholarship.

One, like myself, who is interested in how documentary and other evidence supports our understanding of the past, will find a number of references to such concerns. Lefkowitz writes, for example, “Teachers of course need to have freedom to experiment and to test new theories and interpretations. But academic freedom does not give us the right to rewrite history without reference to the known facts – even if by doing so we imagine that we can bring about social improvement” (p. 13). Her commentary on incidents at her school (Wellesley), how her criticism of publications such as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena soon evolved into a convoluted set of accusations about Jews exploiting blacks and a focus on race rather than historical scholarship, and the libel suit involving her and the subsequent lack of support by her school’s administration places her in the arena of other such academic debates such as the Bellesiles’s scandal on the use or misuse of historical evidence in his study of guns in early America and the Irving suit against Lipstadt, also involving historical evidence. Lefkowitz seeks to bring all these various matters together, seeking “to describe and expose some of the strategies and arguments that were used to turn an uncontroversial statement about history into a controversy about race and, even beyond that, into an inquiry about the purpose of education.” She seeks “to use my experience to show why it is better in the end for all of us to pay attention to facts, and argue from evidence” (p. 14).

This is a book archivists will want to read, for several reasons. First, Lefkowitz seems to be on the side of the angels for her views on the importance of evidence. “The only way one can learn about the ancient world is by studying its surviving texts and artifacts,” she writes. “We have no other choice. We have not lived in antiquity or in the settings of civilizations like those found in the ancient world” (p. 123). Second, archivists understand the complexities about the nature and veracity of historical documentation, their role in influencing or shaping what documentation is saved and how it is used – and Lefkowitz provides some commentary on such matters. Archivists have become more aware of how limited their documentation can be and how scholars and others are stretching into other forms of information to build historical cases and interpretations. Nevertheless, archivists must always be aware of how such evidence stacks up in the long run. As Lefkowitz suggests, “It is through the use of evidence that we can separate good scholarship from bad, in any field. The best argument is not the one we like, or the one that is argued most persuasively, but the one that offers the best account of all the available facts” (p. 132). And, third, archivists are aware of the trouble they can be in for gathering evidence from a range of conflicting groups or in enabling scholars and other researchers to have access to evidence about controversial issues. In this regard, Lefkowitz, despite the personal grief she experienced, indicates it was all worth it: “Even with all the anguish and worry that was involved, it was a privilege to be involved in an important intellectual controversy, to need to explain myself and to take nothing for granted” (pp. 148-149).

Carnivals and Journalists

There are a growing number of assessments appearing about the plight of journalists and their employing publications. I try to read some of the more interesting ones because, first, the media is a barometer of what is happening with information in the digital age and, second, their products, newspapers and news magazines, have long been important documents that librarians and archivists administer.

Neil Henry, a former news reporter and now journalism professor, has given us a surprisingly compelling of journalism in his American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Henry sounds a similar refrain as he reflects about whether the weakening of journalism is a troubling sign of what is happening with our society. “As I take stock of the marvels of the age, I can’t help but worry about the direction of a society in which there are ever fewer arbiters who are trusted and recognized by a consensus of citizens,” Henry muses (p. 11). Although Henry demonstrates that the internal problems – plagiarism, fabrication, ethical miscues – journalism has inflicted on itself are nothing new, he still argues that the declining influence of the journalistic enterprise can’t be good for our society: “When professional journalism is systemically weakened in an age when we should expect it to be better after centuries of refinement aimed at creating higher standards, our faith in what joins us as a people in a civil society is also damaged in a way that is difficult to repair” (p. 41).

Henry’s book is an insider’s examination of his own profession, with recommendations for change and an interesting assessment of how to educate future journalists that makes this book another compelling account of professional schools and their mission in universities.

What caught my attention, however, is how Henry depicts the role of journalists in our society: “Real journalists are experts at presenting these reports to the public – these products of dedicated intellectual process, of digging and hard work – in as timely, substantive, accurate, and independent a fashion as possible. Journalists regard serving the public trust as central to their purpose, and they believe in questioning and, if necessary, challenging power and vested interests to protect that trust. They question the powerful on the behalf of the ordinary citizen and regard corporate and political elites as subjects to be watched closely, not as figures to be fawned over. Journalists are professionals with ethical and moral standards who inform the people in a democracy about the community and the world so that we all may become knowledgeable enough to make decisions about the best ways to improve our lives” (p. 58). Later, Henry writes, “Real journalism means cutting through the deceptions and fraud and being willing to stand up and fight the pressures that would compromise the practice of the craft. It means bearing witness and telling the truth” (p. 210).

So, my question is, how does Henry’s characterization of journalists differ from how we think of the role of archivists? Isn’t it closer than we might assume? Archivists are experts in records and recordkeeping systems, preserving documents for use by society for evidence, accountability, and memory. If they are doing this, then they also must be standing against the powers and principalities of the world as well. If they are not, and often it does not seem that way, then they are supporting the powerbrokers and are pawns in controlling records and information systems for their purposes. This is, of course, not an easy issue to deal with, but it is one archivists must mull over.

The Story of a Photograph

In 1976 news photographer Stanley Forman captured an image of a teenager lunging a pole with the American flag at a black man walking near city hall during Boston’s protests about forced school busing. Historian Louis P. Masur provides the story of the photograph, winning later a Pulitzer Prize, in his The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008). “In one click of a photographer’s shutter,” writes Mazur, “the anti-busing claim that the movement was not driven by racism and that protestors were patriotic defenders against tyranny, came undone” (p. 53).

Mazur spins a good story, chronicling the school busing controversy, following-up on the various players associated with the photograph, dissecting the nature of news photography and the veracity of photographs in general, and making interesting comparisons with other images of the American flag. “One can tell a compelling story about America from the three great news photographs that feature Old Glory: Joe Rosenthal’s [image of the flag raising at Iwo Jima], Stanley Forman’s, and Tom Franklin’s [photograph of the flag raising at the World Trade Center site after its destruction on 9/11]. The story would be about triumphant nationalism in World War II, deep-rooted hatred at the time of the Bicentennial, and stubborn courage in the face of catastrophe in the new millennium” (p. 177)

What we also have is an example of how each photograph, residing in an archives, yearns to tell a story. Mazur’s book is, in one sense, a lengthy finding aid to the Forman image.

Interning

Internships have always been a part of graduate archival education, from its beginnings in the 1930s to the present. Jeannette Bastian and Donna Webber, Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2008) provides an excellent instruction manual to the nature of these internships. As Bastian and Webber note, while internships have been long recognized as important, there has been little advice or critical analysis of this aspect of educating archivists.

These authors provide a history of archival internships, the nature and role of these internships, and the respective responsibilities of faculty, site supervisors, and students. There is little that Bastian and Webber do not cover in this very practical publication. Most interesting to me is the tension between a more theoretical education and the practical internship or, as the authors state, “Too great an emphasis on internships may reduce archival education to mere training, but with no practical learning at all, students are ill-equipped to enter a workplace that places a high value on experience” (p. 15). This is an issue generating some debate in the profession since its beginning, and while Archival Internships is not intended to resolve the debate, I am hoping that it will finally lead to some substantial research about how effective various kinds of internships are in educating new archivists.

We are moving towards a completely new kind of archival education, and it is difficult to know how the historic synergy between fieldwork and classroom work will be affected. It is obvious that a large portion, if not the majority, of archivists will be prepared by Web-based, online education, and this means that the internship also will have to adapt. In the meantime, the Bastian and Webber guide will be the place to start when considering the internship.

Into the Tunnel

Recently, there has been some challenge to the notion that social justice is a part of the professional responsibilities of archivists and records managers. Anyone who has been reading my blog probably can figure out what side of the argument I come down on. I recommend anyone who is waffling about this issue read Götz Aly’s brief book, Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel, 1931-1943 (New York: Metropolitan Books, published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007).

Aly’s book is an in-depth analysis of the “ordinary victim” of the Holocaust, in this case a young Jewish girl killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Why Marion Samuel? A foundation called Remembrance annually awards a prize named after her, selected because she is a virtually anonymous victim of the Holocaust. When German historian Aly heard that he had received this award in 2003, he set about to discover all he could her. He used every sort of document – address and telephone books, government records, and oral testimonies – and recovered as much of her life as he could. The book reproduces relevant evidence from census records, family photographs, birth records, medical sources, corporate records, property and tax records, military records, and personal correspondence. All of this is routine government and corporate documentation, much of it administered by professional archivists and records administrators, and much of it used for the routine extermination of a particular group of people. I am sure of these records professionals also would have argued against social justice as an issue they should address.

Walther Seinsch, co-founder of the Remembrance Foundation and the Marion Samuel Prize, expresses appreciation to Aly in an afterward in the book that ought to cause most records professionals to rethink their working assumptions about issues affecting their technical knowledge: “We must research, document, and remember – especially because the liars, the relativizers, and those who want to simply stop thinking about the events all continue in their work. Creative and heartless, they seek to bend the facts: to forget, displace, varnish over, escape from the responsibility of speaking the truth. Ultimately, not speaking the truth means ignoring the victims, including Marian Samuel” (p. 110). Archivists and other records professionals who blithely step around notions like social justice are justifiably indicted in such an assessment, in my opinion.