Blank Spaces in Records

Imtiaz Habib gives us an interesting, detailed effort of accounting for the presence of black individuals and families in English archives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2008) analyzes as many documents relating to blacks as could be found in legal, taxation, medical, civic, and personal archives in these two centuries, providing an item by item description of the 448 documents in a chronological listing at the end of the volume. Habib states frequently throughout his volume that this is not a comprehensive assessment: “To aspire to definitiveness in the detritus of personal, mercantile, legal, and governmental minutiae cannot be a feasible prospect because the accidental, discontinuous, and impossibly dispersed nature of the survival of such details ensure for them a slate of perpetually incomplete recovery” (pp. 13-14). Any researcher – historian, genealogist, or antiquarian – who has worked in such early records could affirm such problems and challenges, for virtually any topic, although whether such researchers would describe the records in the same fashion – “obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records” (p. 1) or “voluminous cryptic citations” (p. 2) – is problematic because Habib’s agenda is different than merely compiling evidence of black lives in old records.

So, what is this book about? Yes, indeed, it is an effort to uncover as much can be about the presence of Blacks in early England. “Presence” is the critical term, it seems. Here is one way in which Habib uses “presence”: “The very idea of a black presence as such may appear difficult to validate, because the specificity of such a presence seems to be absent from or ignored in these archives. Yet, precisely that feature may be what makes these records significant despite their numerical slightness. The curiously causal or cryptic content of such references can be seen to confirm the evolving sense of early Tudor attitudes to black people, in the fact that such casualness or crypticity could mark a linguistic nonchalance about such a group that is indicative of a cultural space for them in the early Tudor social imaginary” (p. 50). Or, more simply, it is hard to piece together substantial evidence about this social and racial group. What Habib contends, really, is that traditional historical and other scholars are unable to discover such evidence unless they follow the trail blazed by Derrida and Foucault and other poststructuralists and postcolonial theorists who understand that “to navigate the archives is also to construct them” (p. 11). This theoretical orientation, whatever its value, also leads to some pretty dense writing.

What is this book not really about? Let’s consider what Habib states about early Tudor period archives: “Whereas all the records of black people presented in this book have a varyingly uncertain luminosity, some early Tudor black records occupy an irrecoverable heuristic eporia – orthographic and archival, as well as historical. Such records are mere palimpsests of human presence, the outlines or substances of whose narratives no ancillary light can sharpen, and who must therefore be read as the models of their own meaning. To track the early modern English black subjects’ archival beginnings is thus to negotiate the disjunctive history and indeterminate logic of early modern English archival culture itself” (p. 19). Ah, archival culture it is that we will learn about. . . well, no, not really. What we learn about is the archival culture according to folks like Derrida and Foucault, not the actual culture of four hundred years ago. In fact, while Habib provides detailed descriptions of document after document with some reference to blacks, we read nothing about the legal, administrative, and other aspects of recordkeeping that was forming, in quite systematic and regulated fashion, during this period. Archival culture will be revealed by theoretical models guiding us through these four hundred-plus documents discovered with references to black lives. I don’t think this really works; it does not read as a full study, but more as a complex finding aid to a set of records discovered by laborious searching through actual archives and published documents from these archives. There is a difference between how we read archival culture from today’s perspective and how we immerse ourselves into the archival guides, manuals, laws, traditions, practices of the period itself, although admittedly this is not Habib’s agenda as it turns out. You will learn something about how blacks are represented in records, something of the black lives themselves, and a lot about poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches. Archivists and those interested in archives can still learn about some interesting ways of studying archival documents.

Academic Archives

When I entered the archival profession in the early 1970s, we were right at the point where academic archives and archivists were emerging as professional leaders. By the mid-1980s, I was hearing some individuals speculate that the academic institution was perhaps the most documented, even over-documented, institution in society. In the next decade, college and university archivists seemed to be in the forefront of wrestling with new approaches to basic archival functions, such as appraisal and description. And today, these programs continue to be the main employer of most entry-level archivists.

In the midst of all this, the Society of American Archivists published, in 1979, a reader about college and university archives, an acknowledgment of the important role these programs were playing in the American archival community. Just recently, SAA has published a new reader, edited by Christopher J. Prom and Ellen D. Swain, College and University Archives: Readings in Theory and Practice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2008). It is volume all academic archivists should acquire, and it provides an interesting window into the state of the modern American archival community.

The thirteen essays included in this volume, most of them freshly written for the publication, are grouped in three sections – defining the purpose of the academic archives, the documenting of colleges and universities, and administering these kinds of programs. The editors indicate there are also three themes threading through the essays, namely, the challenges of new information technologies, the need for academic archives to be more cooperative and collaborative, and the continuing need for academic archives to be proactive in promoting their archival agenda. We read about information technology, oral history, documenting diversity, faculty papers, outreach, processing of archival records, records management and archival administration, privacy and confidentiality issues, intellectual property, and servicing researchers. In other words, all the bases are adequately covered.

One might feel that the themes represented in the volume are nearly identical to those from its thirty-year old predecessor, and, in fact, a number of the contributors, including the editors, affirm that this is the case. Some areas emerge as more prominent, however, and, not surprisingly, information technology as both tool for and challenge of academic archivists is right at the head of the list. Just reflect on all the new technological issues academic archivists face today that were not present (at least in any profound sense) in 1979: the World Wide Web, blogs, email, Websites, listservs, digitization, personal computing, digital photography, electronic desktop publishing, electronic theses and dissertations, and so forth (indeed, it would be relatively easy to add to such a list).

When archivists consider such challenges, they tend to get both fatalistic and immensely self-reflective (I know, because I have littered the archival literature with such musings). The editors of this volume, summarizing the essays and painting in broader strokes the common themes, do this at the end of their discussion about technology: “If we are not careful, many of us may find ourselves to be the marginalized keepers of idle curiosities. Worse, we may find ourselves to have been complicit in a failure to adequately preserve institutional memory and a complete record that will allow for future research and historical understanding” (p. vi). In a recent essay -- “The Academic Archives of the Future,” EDUCAUSE Review 43 (March/April 2008): 10-11 – I stated pretty much the same sentiment. However, the SAA has instituted a new service for sharing new work on digital case studies in the academic realm that promises to transform any pessimistic assessment of the future of academic archives, described as follows: “College and university archivists working on solutions for born-digital records can post their reports under ‘Campus Case Studies’ on the website of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). This portal allows quick and broad dissemination of completed projects, or a work-in-progress. Elements for the case study include institutional context and background; nature of the records; key challenges anticipated; appraisal, processing, and preservation accomplished prior to the case study; resources; analysis; and future plans” (you can find the eight case studies now available at http://www.archivists.org/publications/epubs/CampusCaseStudies/casestudies.asp. These supplement the published reader in this area, and they suggest that more dire predictions about the future of academic archives might be somewhat exaggerated.

However, before we become too optimistic, we need to realize that over thirty years most of the challenges facing academic archives and their professional staffs persist. Nevertheless, there are a few more topics that could have been explored by the authors in this volume and that seem notable in their underdevelopment. First, there could have been more attention to international developments in academic archives; while there are citations to and descriptions of work in other nations, there is little of a substantial comparative analysis. One major change over the thirty years since the publication of its predecessor volume is the globalization of archives. Second, while changes in graduate archival education are acknowledged, there is only modest discussion about the roles, real and potential, the graduate programs could play in assisting academic archives. Given the long-standing relationship between the education programs and university archives, this seems like an omission. Third, and last, I think there could have been more speculation about the changing role, actual and imagined, of academic archives in the context of the changing nature of higher education. Again, over the past three decades, we have witnessed the emergence of the corporate university, with all of its interesting debates about the mission of higher education and an array of ethical and other issues producing a rich and varied scholarship, and there is little reference to such matters. This volume could have been the right time to tackle such a matter.

Having stated a few reservations, I am happy to have this volume as a useful benchmark documenting the development of American academic archives. Everyone interested in this aspect of archival work should acquire the volume.

Files, Not So Simple After All

Want to read a book about paper filing systems that stretches your imagination and challenges your most basic assumptions? Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) is a detailed examination of the shifting legal, administrative, and technological aspects of files, extending from the ancient world to the modern era. Vismann, a German legal historian and scholar, has given us a meditation of how records have changed through the centuries, with the intention of revealing, “how files control the formalization and differentiation of the law” (p. xii). While Vismann indicates that this book is written for those who work with files, have worked with files, or have forgotten how files function because of new technologies that transform their functions, this is a book really for the serious scholar of recordkeeping and the archival function. It is not a book that can be skimmed lightly or read at the beach or assigned to the novice archival student. As a study, Files provides complex assessments of key shifts in record-making and archiving, drawing heavily on European examples but at times ranging widely across the geopolitical and historical landscape. There are ideas I am still wrestling with and conclusions I question, but this is a book, despite its rather pedestrian title, that intellectually engaged me in new and different ways.

To make its heavily pedantic analysis come to its most basic point, Vismann believes that the day of the paper file is over and that we can sit back and reflect on the importance of this historic run of recordkeeping. At least this is what the book’s advertising précis tells us: “Once files are reduced to the status of stylized icons on computer screens, the reign of paper files appears to be over. With the epoch of files coming to an end, we are free to examine its fundamental influence on Western institutions. From a media-theoretical point of view, subject, state, and law reveal themselves to be effects of specific record keeping and filing practices. Files are not simply administrative tools; they mediate and process legal systems. The genealogy of the law described in Vismann's Files ranges from the work of the Roman magistrates to the concern over one's own file, as expressed in the context of the files kept by the East German State Security. The book concludes with a look at the computer architecture in which all the stacks, files, and registers that had already created order in medieval and early modern administrations make their reappearance.” Assuming that has been written by the author, we can also assume that this is what she intends us to find in the book. However, it can be rough going, as she delves into particular epochs and records systems and then shifts into the next. Does she convince the reader that the paper file era is over? I don’t believe she does, but her book is full of such rich and interesting insights about recordkeeping that it is worth a go. And, in some ways, her analysis of past recordkeeping practices, changes, and technologies are more useful than in her overall sense of us being on the cusp of yet another major shift (like parchment to paper, scrolls to codex, documents to files, and so forth).

After an interesting orientation to the nature of writing in legal terms and the various means by which scholars and administrators often consider records, Vismann begins analyzing how the earliest documents came into being and what they evolved into (scrolls to codices, papyrus to more durable parchment) and how they increasingly supported political, legal, and economic structures. In ancient Rome, for example, “from the times of the early Republic up to the reign of Justinian, Rome teems with files, notebooks, official minutes, diaries, municipal records, protocols” (p. 47). Our intrepid scholar shows how early magistrates relied on spoken commands and written documents were used sparingly for bridging time and space. However, the nature of record-making changes; for example, the “act of recording acquires independence once it is not the transmission itself but the control of the transmission that is emphasized” (p. 51). New approaches to recording and keeping records in public repositories lead to a new kind of “truth claim” and records became connected to storage points rather than any individuals (p. 52). As modern archivists acknowledge, when in ancient Rome files are placed in a “specially designated repository, their function fundamentally changes.” “According to the ideal of the archive,” Vismann writes, “the law is the sum of all files on record. They are the capital of the law” (p. 58). The Justinian codes “legitimized power” by connecting back to old Rome, and the codex was used to create a “comprehensive repository of the old empire, in which everything that had ever been regulated or examined existed simultaneously on one level without contradicting or annulling anything else” (p. 65). I love such descriptions, breathing new life into old records systems. And I am sure Vismann’s work might engage some archival theorists and scholars, working from within the archival community, to question, probe, and dissect her ides and conclusions.

Vismann next considers the shift to documents, with documents being for preservation rather than transmission, featuring ornamental writing, and formalization with seals and signatures and other such devices. This is the era of diplomatics, the science of verifying documents, with its “binary code of true or false” but with the existence of files “subject neither to formal instructions nor to criteria of authenticity. They proliferate and decay, but they do not conform to a binary scheme” (p. 74). Diplomatics is a science directed at individual documents, rather than their aggregate (although some uses of this old archival science for electronic recordkeeping might contradict this). Reading such a truncated view of what Vismann is analyzing might seem shallow and confusing, but her dense scrutiny of the shifts in various recording approaches rewards the reader interested in this topic with insights about the complexities in the nature of recording and recordkeeping. What this scholar is seeking to show is how files, what generally characterizes modern Western administration, governance, and law, have continued to proliferate. “For the administrations of the Western world, a life without files, without any recording, a life off the record, is simply unthinkable” (p. xii). And it is the particulars of this basic fact or characteristic that are worth mulling over.

Files offers a lot of interesting material about particular documentary forms and recordkeeping services, such as registers, the emergence of chanceries, the creation of offices, and the impact of new digital technologies. The emphasis on systematic recordkeeping is seen in how the new nation states utilized documents. So, for example, “following the devastations of the Thirty Years War, language had become a sanctuary for political action. Words are more easily ordered than territories, and they are more obedient than mercenaries” (p. 103). Read how she believes that archives and records agencies came to be: “Registering outgoing documents, taking notes, and collecting drafts and letters led to an exponential growth of written matter. As files increased in weight and took up more space, they demanded a room of their own” (p. 96). As she slides into the nuances she makes between records and archives in her review of the Stasi files case in a unified Germany, one can feel both enlightened and befuddled about her distinctions (although archival theorists have been just as nitpicky in their distinctions, divisions, and definitions) about what these files represent when used by historical scholars, legal experts in court cases, and by individuals represented in the very files. Ultimately, Vismann gets us to her penultimate point, that the records we see on computer screens are “stylized icons,” turning users into “virtual chanceries or chancellors” (p. 163).

Don’t pack this book to the beach, but definitely schedule for a reading in the future. It stirs the mind.

Holocaust Restitution

The movement of the past decade or two to provide restitution for the victims of the Holocaust also brought with it an intense use of archives and other records, as well as efforts to hide or destroy these sources. Michael J. Bazyler and Roger P. Alford, eds., Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 2006) provides an interesting window into this, with essays by lawyers, government officials, and the victims themselves. The essays are grouped around the various litigations concerning the banks, slave labor, insurance payments, and looted art. There are also essays providing a general overview and legacy implications of the restitution battles.

Some of what is in this volume will be very familiar to archivists and their colleagues. William Slany, for example, notes the important role of the National Archives, arguing that the reports on the looted assets of Holocaust victims “could not have been written by mobilized federal historians and researchers without the enthusiastic support and full resources of the National Archives, which became the headquarters of the international research in Holocaust-era assets” (p. 35). The passing of generations and the fading memory of the war and the Holocaust also bring forth concerns about a loss of just what happened in this war. Deborah Sturman reflects on how the Holocaust litigation has affected Germany’s remembrance and understanding of its role in the war: “As the war becomes ever more distant, Germans become more readily willing to disregard (or at least consider resolved) the crimes of the war and the Holocaust and instead focus on the Allies’ wartime and postwar excesses” (pp. 217-218). She believes that “with each successive generation having a less personal relationship to, or first-hand knowledge of, the war and its participants, Germany’s willingness to assume either moral or economic responsibility towards the victims has declined” (p. 219). Archivists and the users of archives recognize that this is just one of many reasons why archives are so important in our society.

There are some surprises, concerning the nature of recordkeeping and the Holocaust victims, in this volume. Edward Korman’s essay on the influence of the Swiss banks on the history of that industry in the Second World War is interesting in this regard. Noting that for a long time Swiss banks regularly disposed of Second World War-era accounts after ten years, as legally allowed for by their laws, and the ending of this with the Federal Decree of 1996 declaring such destruction as being illegal, Korman chronicles that such destruction has continued to the present: “What we do know is that for 40 percent of bank accounts open or opened in Switzerland between 1933 and 1945, there is no record at all, and for the rest, there is often no more than a customer registry card” (p. 129). While the notion of Swiss neutrality during the war had long ago disappeared, the knowledge that banking and other critical records had continued to be destroyed after the revelations about the country’s support of the Third Reich became public is all the more startling.

While this volume provides a lot of useful commentary on the legal and political maneuverings concerning Holocaust restitution, it also gives voice to the victims themselves. For example, an individual used for slave labor by a company manufacturing aircraft for the Third Reich, writes, “Hitler took away my father’s name and gave him a number. The insurance companies took it away again. It isn’t on any revealed lists and they pretend that he never existed. I want them to acknowledge that he lived, that he died, and that the way he died matters to his son and to the grandchildren he never knew” (p. 100). It is these personal testimonies that make all the more compelling the importance of archives in providing evidence about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews of Europe by the Third Reich and its allies.

Closest to Home: Local Government Archives

The report by the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), “Closest to Home”: Archival Programs for Local Government Records, issued in January 2008 and available at http://www.statearchivists.org/lga/index.htm, is an important benchmark assessment of local government archives. It is also a sad commentary on the failures of the American archival community.

Closest to Home nicely enumerates all the challenges represented in managing local government archives, including issues of standards, lack of attention by local governments, weak federal government role, problems with professional staffing, poor advocacy, under-use by any group except perhaps genealogists, inadequate funding, and new information technology concerns. If these problems sound familiar they should; they are nearly identical to reports issued by the American Association of State and Local History, the National Association of Government Archives and Records Managers, and some state archives two and three decades ago. Armed with a plan of action, a case statement for advocacy, the production of a “toolkit” for educating policymakers and the public, detailed issue reports on funding, advocacy, training, and new technologies by leading experts, and background materials, it is still impossible to escape the conclusion that it seems that no progress has been made in local government archives for a very long time. Reading the draft brochure, Local Government Archives and You: Your Heritage, Your Rights, Your Community, was like turning back the clock and reading statements about the importance of local archives produced by the New York State Archives in 1983 and 1988, no surprise given the important role of Bruce Dearstyne in both the earlier and more recent projects.

Even the report’s recommendations do not seem very new or innovative. Developing evaluative criteria, urging state archives to assume stronger leadership, getting professional associations signed on, pushing for a greater role by the federal government, increasing funding, strengthening advocacy, providing new training, instituting new initiatives for electronic records and information technologies, and so forth, have all been stated in the 1980s and 1990s. The question looming, then, is what happened over the past generation that local government archives seem to have been so neglected. The comment that FEMA is providing $2.6 million for an Intergovernmental Preparedness for Essential Records (IPER) project may indicate a breakthrough, except for the fact that there has been funding in the past and bright ideas as well; the funding for this particular project was provided by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, a federal funding agency with a bright past but a cloudy future.

So, in reading this report, I looked for two elements. First, what does it suggest about why so little success has been made in recent decades with local government archives? Second, what does the report suggest in the way of action that is a departure or breakthrough from previous national programs to improve the management of these records? Overall, the report really does not provide reasons why so little success has generated from past efforts that have enumerated similar, often nearly identical, recommendations. Nor does the report really give much hope for future breakthroughs. Again, this is a very nice assessment, and it provides a lot to contemplate, but it is hard not to be cynical about future prospects given past failures.

There are mysterious aspects, at least to me, to this report. For example, the first challenge listed is the “absence of widely accepted standards as to what constitutes ‘adequate’ or ‘sufficient’ care and management of local government archival records” (p. 7). I really do not understand this. After all, there are numerous earlier efforts to define precisely such standards and benchmarks in textbooks and other reports. However, we don’t need to restrict ourselves to the literature on local government archives, but we can examine lots of other texts on archives generally. This seems more like an excuse than a real issue. What might be debatable is that the existence of such standards will lead to practical actions. Perhaps what this suggests about the experiences of the past few decades is that we have not learned that we need to build from real, practical successes rather just platitudes and general statements. Will standards be used in any voluntary way, even if they exist?

Here is another example suggesting that we need to view the nature of local government archives (and this report about them) in their broader societal, historical, and professional contexts. One of the report’s challenges is described in this way: “There is no national professional association devoted exclusively – or even primarily – to local government archival records” (p. 8). Later in the report there are lists of various professional and national associations, with statements such as “engaging these types of associations – and their state counterparts – holds vast, largely unexplored and untapped potential for getting the word out and engaging advocates and supporters well beyond the archives/records community” (p. 19). I don’t agree with word choices such as “unexplored” and “untapped”; I entered the profession in the early 1970s and since the late 1970s all I ever seemed to hear of or to be involved in concerned trying to get such associations, on both the state and national levels, engaged with the problems of local government archives. This makes it sound that one relatively straightforward task is to establish or re-establish such an association. However, there has been a long tradition of attention on local government archives in the Society of American Archivists, at least by its hospitality to host conference sessions and publish studies in its journal (I have presented and published on this topic). Moreover, in the mid-1980s, the National Association of State Government Archivists and Records Managers (NASARA) became NAGARA precisely in order to provide a focus on local government archives and records issues. Why, then, do we lack a professional association with some focus in this area?

To be more cynical, some of the recommendations in the report seem to be more wishful thinking than realistic objectives. For example, recommendation four calls for an expanded federal government responsibility and role for local government records. The rationale for this is quite logical – “many of the programs administered by local governments are mandated by of funded by the federal government, or both” (p. 22). Of course, the logic has always been there. It was there thirty years ago when NHPRC funded a lot of “model” local government records projects, when the 1983 report on statewide historical records planning was issued, and when NAGARA a few years later prepared a plan for millions of federal dollars to be poured into state and local government archives and records management programs. Such support never happened; what has changed to make us think this is a realistic objective?

Many of the recommendations for action will require significant national coordination and a lot of money, but more importantly to achieve these objectives will require that they do not become the activities of special projects and external funds but become regularly supported activities of at least the state archives. This is probably always where the weak link in the chain has been. The state archives have limited resources or are unwilling to reallocate resources in new strategic ways. There have been exceptions to this, of course, as the New York State Archives demonstrated amply in the 1980s and 1990s. However, time and time again, such noteworthy objectives as dealing with local government archives and records issues have simply not gained firm foundations because there were always other priorities or because there were uncertainties about staff expertise and other similar issues. Or, to put it more bluntly, is this really a national problem or a local or regional one? I remember twenty years ago the emphasis on creating model government archives and records management programs that could be used as exemplars for others to emulate. There were a few, but I suspect it may be easier and more beneficial to stress the creation of these programs, than to try to solve all the problems of local government archives across the United States.

There is a lot of good, commonsense advice offered in the report. Its authors address education in a solid fashion. Noting that respondents to their survey “indicated a preference for in-person, hands-on training and individual courses,” they indicate that there is a better way, that trying to meet this demand is “simply too labor, time, and resource intensive to deliver the educational content that needs to be delivered” (p. 37). The report suggests online education approaches, mentions a few examples, but fails to grapple with the fact that graduate archival education programs are moving to distance education approaches and that many have existing courses which could be adapted for local government archives issues and needs and are willing to work with alternative kinds of course offerings to meet practical needs in various aspects of archival work. Yet, the more important practical observation may rest with this statement concerning the effort to talk with experts, gather data, and develop recommendations: “Often working in relative isolation, they found that the Project provided an informal forum for them to get together, share ideas, and show pride in their accomplishments. In effect, the Project has served to begin defining and coalescing a community of interested, concerned professionals who are generous in sharing what they know and what they have learned. There is a need to keep that community together and growing and to sustain the interest and momentum that the Project has helped generate” (p. 44). This may sound a bit too self-congratulatory, but our bigger worry is that this is also usually an observation of other, earlier projects extending back into the 1970s. Honestly, the archives field is scattered with many impressive projects with strong starts that withered and died due to declining interest, other priorities, lack of funding, poor leadership, and lack of creativity and imagination.

Finally, I really wonder whether local government archives are unique in their problems, needs, challenges, and values. I question whether the rich literature, of both basic practice and, more recently, developing research case studies doesn’t really illuminate why archival initiatives in local government have such a spotty record. In fact, I think what is missing from this CoSA effort is a focus on research that builds on earlier successes and failures, providing data that will inform better future efforts. There have been lots of innovative efforts, some model building and experimentation, and other interesting approaches to local government archives that have never been thoroughly analyzed and documented. Why not put some effort into this in this project? We can push all the other advocacy efforts while we do this, but it also would be useful if we had a better understanding of how such earlier advocacy efforts succeeded or failed (think of the interesting films prepared and aired on television about brittle paper and digital records – does anyone really know what positive results these brought about?).

In fairness to the various advisors, authors, and consultants involved in this project, it must be stated that they understand something about the legacy of efforts concerning the care and management of local government archives. Geog Huth, in his report on sustainable funding issues, writes, “Action is the keyword. Over the last several decades, archivists have reviewed the state of local government archives and found it lacking. Year after year, state by state, in most local governments in the country, the state of local government archives is dire, and the situation is usually improving only slowly, if at all. Merely understanding the problem has not helped archivists solve the problem. Experimenting with solutions is the only way.” Huth notes that there is no guarantee about any of this, but he argues that “if interested parties in the archives profession band together to push through change, some improvement is assured” (p. 4). The problem is that such confidence was there in the past, and the results were meager at best. Is there anything in this report and the continuing project that will offer better and more positive change? I don’t see it at this point.

I am grateful, however, to have the report to use in my teaching and for it stimulating my own thinking about local government archives and records management, a place where I worked thirty years ago and tried to improve in my own small way.

Moving Images and Archives

Two recent books provide some interesting perspectives on film and archives. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, eds., Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) provide a collection of essays that “together demonstrate the possibility of film scholarship without films; for using primary materials other than films themselves for examining the history of the cinema in the United States” (p. 2). The various contributors to this volume believe that the “primary materials for studying industry, regulation, and reception cannot be the films themselves. Instead, they will most typically be on paper (and on microfilm and the Internet) as the material evidence left, for instance, by fans, censors, critics, and government officials; in other words, the very materials most often studied by institutions working in other disciplines” (p. 5). These essayist draw on personal papers, newspapers, magazines, trade materials, fan magazines, studio publications, industry records, educational materials, research publications, and government records. The editors note that this volume is intended to be used by film scholars and undergraduates in film history classes, and archivists interested in film studies also will want to peruse this volume, especially as the editors intend their collection to be “contributing to an ongoing historiographic project in film studies, one that asks questions about methods in history and theories of historical understanding” (p. 29).

Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) is an account of the develop of courses and programs in film studies from about 1915 to 1935, most notably Columbia University, New York University, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and Syracuse University. Polan’s detailed study is an example of the approach represented in the Lewis and Smoodin collection, while providing both an in-depth analysis of the origins of a profession and another useful study on the history of American higher education. Throughout the volume, Polan provides tantalizing assessments of discoveries in archives; for example, in his chapter on Harry Alan Potamkin, Polan writes, “In the papers of the influential film critic Harry Alan Potamkin . . . there was found ‘A Proposal for a School of the Motion Picture,’ a program never implemented partly because Potamkin died at a young age in 1933 (p. 236). Polan’s work provides both an excellent historical background on film studies and a model for how to draw on the archival sources documenting the early years of the field.

From an archival perspective, I wish both volumes would have gone a little farther. The various essayists in the Lewis and Smoodin volume could have been a bit more explicit in their use of archival sources, or, there could have been a separate essay on the topic of the archival materials. Likewise, Polan could have provided an appendix describing the nature of the archival sources he drew upon. However, this is a minor quibble.

Founders’ Archives and Documentary Editing

A few months ago the National Archives issued a report – The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of America’s Founding Era; A Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, April 2008). The report was “written at the request” of the U.S. Senate and House Committees on Appropriations, “outlining a plan to provide online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers” (this includes the documentary editions of Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington). As Archivist Allen Weinstein states, the “report proposes a new system that combines the digitized versions of the printed editions along with the raw, unedited transcripts of the yet-to-be-published Founders’ documents. In this way, all of these historical papers will be delivered to the American people more expeditiously” (p. iii). For archivists and others who have paid any attention to the nature and developments of modern documentary editing in the United States, there might be surprise that Congress discovered (finally) that there was a problem. Concern about the length of time it was taking the various documentary projects, especially the Jefferson and Adams papers, has been a well-known and highly debated issue for more than three decades. It must be with curiosity that anyone would open and read the report.

The report suggests that “Congressional concern arose because the completed volumes of the papers of the Founding Fathers have been slow to appear, and can be costly for the average citizen to access. Congress also is concerned that the availability of the papers of the Founding Fathers is being held up by the editing and publishing processes” (p. vii). Clearly, Congress has been pre-occupied with other, more important issues, since it is easy to find such concerns about these issues going back into the 1970s and 1960s. Of course, there is a more problematic matter displayed here, namely the assumption that the public is demanding access to these documentary editions. Indeed, the NARA report asserts that the “challenge is to determine the best way to make these papers accessible to people throughout the world without losing the rigor of the historical research process” (p. 1). This assumes that people throughout the world desire such access; it is not the case that they don’t want access to some of the documents produced by these individuals, but they doesn’t necessarily mean everything they wrote accompanied by heavy scholarly annotations. In fact, many of the key documents created by the Founding Fathers are available online, in the Library of America, or in even cheaper editions from publishers such as Barnes & Noble. We have confusion here between scholarly historical research generated by documentary editors and access to the documents; one doesn’t necessarily require the other. Assertions about the problems of the “limited accessibility of the published volumes” (limited because of cost and residence in research libraries) still begs the question about just what degree the public wants access to such documents and confuses the needs of the public with that of scholars.

There are promising matters discussed in the report. There is discussion of a more commercial venture, a product named Rotunda developed by the University of Virginia Press to provide online access to the Founding Fathers’ papers, featuring “robust searching capabilities that are superior to a collection of digitized copies” (p. viii). There are also promises that the “Archivist will strengthen independent review processes to ensure that performance measures are rigorous, production goals are accomplished on time, and performance information is used in grant decisions” (p. ix). While this may be a half-century too late, it is at least encouraging to see such statements made. If we get full online, searchable access to all the documentary editions, we will have made progress and documentary editing may truly enter into the digital era with its improved potential for timely and enhanced access.

However, the valuable aspects of the report are weakened by omissions and generalizations. A “brief history” of documentary editing is included, but it is a history that ignores anything of a critical nature about such editing – and some of this critical commentary is pertinent to the issues being considered in the report. For example, this abbreviated history states that Julian Boyd “set the standards for accuracy and inclusion in historical documentary editing” (p. 4), but it sidesteps the fact that there were critics of Boyd’s approach during his own day. There is the sense that this documentary editing must go forward in the same manner that it has for the past half-century or more; while desiring for the speeding up of production, it does not recommend just digitizing the papers not yet published without ever needing the academic process of annotation and historical context. There really has been little concrete evidence that the scholarly process of editing the papers is critical to the question of improved access to the archival remains of the Founding Fathers. Building a new online program including “all of the transcribed and encoded documents,” marked as “’draft’ or ‘verified but unannotated’ and clearly distinguished from the authoritative versions drawn from the annotated print editions” (p. 12) sounds like a positive step but why do researchers or the public require the annotated versions in the first place? Speculating that the enhanced access to the full set of papers “might also lead to contributions from independent scholars, along with the discovery of documents ‘hidden’ in private collections” (p. 13) sounds compelling, except for the fact that these documentary programs have been well publicized since 1950 and the prospects of new discoveries have always been present in the litany of reasons for documentary editing; the possibility of other scholars using the papers has always been present anyway (Lester Cappon, for example, worked with both Julian Boyd and Lyman Butterfield in reviewing the assembled papers of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for the publication of his popular 1959 two-volume edition of the correspondence of these two revolutionary leaders, a publication that has remained constantly in print for fifty years and that possesses a truly light editorial hand). Why promise what has always been possible?

The key to understanding this report may rest with seeing what is not in it and understanding what has been the relationship between the National Archives (and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission) and modern historical documentary editing. In responding to Congress, the authors of the report leave out a lot. For example, Walter Rundell, Jr., in his In Pursuit of American History: Research and Training in the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), had a lot to say about the problems of documentary editing and relying on the materials published in such projects. And, there is no reference to the controversy about scaling back NHPRC financial support for these projects just a decade ago, a controversy that brought out the long-standing concerns about the costs, time, and other resources needed for such projects including the issue of whether they really provided the kind of access needed for both scholars and the public; for an example, see my own "Messrs. Washington, Jefferson, and Gates: Quarrelling about the Preservation of the Documentary Heritage of the United States," First Monday 2 (August 1997), available at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_8/cox/index.html. What we may have here in this present report is another knee-jerk defense of documentary editing, such as the NHPRC published, Ann Gordon, Using the Nation's Documentary Heritage (1992), an earlier defense of the potential power of access by the people to the writings of the Founding Fathers; see my earlier review of this publication, "Archivists and the Use of Archival Records: Or, A View from the World of Documentary Editing," Provenance 9 (1991 [1992]): 89-110.

Personally, I believe that modern documentary editing is an important scholarly endeavor, and that it has made many important contributions to our knowledge of the American past. I also believe that it should continue to be able to do its work. However, I think it ought to be recognized as being a scholarly discipline without needing to resort to extravagant claims about the use of its products by the public. And we should be more realistic about its strengths and weaknesses. That the National Archives has responded to the Congress is laudable, but it could have been much more straightforward about the unsubstantiated claims on behalf of historical documentary editing and still made a substantial case for why and how the papers of the Founding Fathers could be put online. Citing the results of other online historical digitalization projects, for example, could have been the higher road to take. Holding onto the continuing fiction that every American wants to read the entire correspondence of a Jefferson or Adams actually undermines the potential contributions of modern documentary editing.