Introduction

What are archives?

Archives, libraries and museums are all in the ‘memory business’, ensuring ‘time future contained in time past’ (Ketelaar, 2004). But what distinguishes archives from all other memory institutions is that the individual, organizational and collective memories they preserve are not defined primarily in terms of a cultural heritage: they have been created as ‘process-bound information’, that is, ‘information generated by coherent work processes and structured and recorded by these work processes in such a way that it can be retrieved from the context of those work processes’ (Thomassen, 2001, 374). Notwithstanding the importance of this definition for archival theory and methodology, in practice (as I will argue in section 4.7) it is often more important to ask: how does this particular individual or group perceive and understand an archive? Throughout this chapter the term ‘archives’ (or archive) is used to denote two concepts. As in the first sentence of this chapter archives is an organization that collects (and the building that houses) archives. Archives (or records) also means ‘information created, received, and maintained as evidence and/or as an asset by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business or for its purposes, regardless of medium, form or format’ (ISO 30300, 2011, 3.1.7).

Archivists are ‘all those concerned with the control, care, custody, preservation and administration of archives’ (International Council on Archives, 1996), which includes record managers.

Why this chapter?

Many archives call themselves the ‘Memory of the city’ or the ‘Memory of the nation’. There is even a ‘Memory of the world’ – a UNESCO programme to promote ‘the documented, collective memory of the peoples of the world – their documentary heritage’ (UNESCO, 2002). That this is a misleading analogy (Brothman, 2010; Hedstrom, 2010, 174; Jimerson, 2009, 213–14) we discover once we have developed ‘a more refined sense of what memory means in different contexts, but also a sensitivity to the differences between individual and social memory’ (Hedstrom, 2002, 31–2). This in turn, as Margaret Hedstrom argues, will help to create a greater awareness of how collective memory operates.

‘Whether conscious of it or not, archivists are major players in the business of identity politics’ (Schwartz and Cook, 2002, 16). Many archivists claim that identities are constructed and reconstructed through the experience of archival documents (Craven, 2008, 17).