Archive Of The Future: From Passive Curator to Community Facilitator
At the start of my Archive career I held the common notion of the Archivist as a “keeper of information” and the Archive as a place of order and structure. I believed in hierarchy only as it pertained to the organization of records (Archive-speak for files) while I simultaneously championed the ephemeral, the authentic, and the notion of shining a light on those who didn’t always have the loudest voice in the room. It was a righteous place to begin a career and a common starting place for many in the Archive field. As I completed my professional training — by studying Archival literature, earning a master’s degree, joining professional organizations, and gaining hands-on knowledge working in the field — I was ready to tip-toe across the line and get to work.
During the last decade and half I’ve had the opportunity to manage the appraisal, arrangement, description, digitization, and conservation of several archive collections, which included organizational papers, artifacts, and digital documents. As I found myself in room after room of neglected files, I realized the process of moving valuable things out of sight didn’t take care of the problem, it just swept it out of view. As my team and I pieced together bits and atoms, we couldn’t shake the feeling that some truly great material had never made it to the Archive.
“As I found myself in room after room filled with neglected files I realized the process of moving valuable things out of sight, to the attic or the basement, didn’t really take care of the problem, it just swept it out of view.”
“ We couldn’t shake the feeling that some truly great material had never made it to the Archive.”
As I led the Archives at bigger organizations, I found myself farther and farther away from those “without a podium” but who had powerful stories to tell. Instead I found myself building a pedestal of heritage that helped business teams justify their point of view or confirm a popular narrative about the organization. What was often missing between the assets and narrative was the “human experience” at all levels — the institutional knowledge and the expressions of culture that held a light to an organization’s truest self.
From Passive Curator to Community Organizer
This past year I had the opportunity to teach a class as adjunct-professor at Pratt’s School of Information. It’s always a meta experience teaching at a school you went to and particularly so to a class on zoom. One of my favorite take-away articles which I hope the students return to during their Archive careers is by Terry Cook called “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms.” In the article Cook discusses the shift in Archives from the 1800s to present day and outlines them as follows:
Evidence (1800s-1930s) Pre-modern archiving — the custodian-archivist guards the judicial legacy as a passive curator
Memory (1930s-1970s) Modern archiving — the historian-archivist is an active selector and appraiser”
Identity (1970s-2010s) Postmodern archiving — the mediator-archivist shapes the societal archive as a “professional”
Community (2020s) Participatory archiving — the activist-archivist mentors collaborative evidence- and memory-making as a community facilitator
Let’s leave the Evidence, Memory, and Identity phases of Archival thought to those on track for a master’s degree in Archives and focus on the recent shift towards building Community Archives. Those of us in business roles understand how essential it is to meet business objectives and an Archive program is no different — we want to keep what’s important for future business use. But today there’s a gap between what you know and what gets “saved” as part of your organization’s institutional memory. These small personal gaps in knowledge can become team-wide chasms if left untended which erode culture and legacy. This is alarmist but true, and you have the knowledge and the means to fix this problem. We must become better Community facilitators, especially those of us who lead teams and see inherent value in the work we do for our orgs. To begin here’s 3 key strategies to incorporate into your day-to-day:
Identify moments of micro-memory — These moments can be company milestones, product launches, external partnerships, etc. Your team is doing the work so you know what’s significant and worth saving and what to toss. The important thing here is to identify these moments in real time and quickly gather things that help tell a story and showcase final deliverables.
Focus and flare — Materials from cross-functional partners add to the orgs story and it’s likely they send you decks and presentations that add context to what you do and the org at large. Save these high level materials from specific knowledge holders alongside your team’s to complete the picture. Even better do your own outreach and crowdsource to find like minded people in your org who see cultural value in work your teams do to connect dots. Use these materials to celebrate and hindsight.
Doordash it — Take these high level materials and make them accessible and easy to digest. Don’t allow collecting and accessibility of materials to add administrative work to your team instead find ways to automate and value add. Use technology to your advantage to find context in what you’ve earmarked to save and quickly curate, create a timeline or add your voice.
These 3 key strategies boil processes down to their essence in order to streamline and help you stop kicking the Archival can down the hallway to deal with next fiscal year. Spend 30 minutes a week on saving what you know. Advocate for others to do the same and your org will benefit from the added context and key insights being collected instead of letting it be discarded or sent to digital purgatory.
