Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France, 1820-1870

This book is on sale through November and December if purchased through the website (using the link above). Regular price is $32, sale price is $20.

We have excess inventory of this title and need to sell some copies.

The current issue of Interactions has a review of Richard Cox’s latest book, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections, and Ruminations. The review, by Kim Anderson, gives a thorough description of the book.

I have posted Chapter One of John Ridener’s From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory to the Litwin Books website. The chapter is called Why Study Archival Theory? and is a good introduction to the book…

MIT has posted podcasts from the five plenary sessions at Media in Transition 6, at the Comparative Media Studies program’s podcast page. The plenary sessions were on “Archives and History,” “New Media, Civic Media,” “Institutional Perspectives on Storage,” “The Future of Publishing,” and “Summary Perspectives.” I think these plenary sessions were the best part of the conference. Glad they’re posted.

I attended Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission in Cambridge, MA, April 24-26. (Follow that link for a summary of what the conference was about.) Here are my thoughts about the conference after returning home.

Of primary interest to me, coming from Duluth, MN, where it was below freezing yesterday, was the beautiful weather and quaint, New Englandy setting of Cambridge. It was warm, approaching the 70s. Second after the weather and the architecture the most noticeable thing about Cambridge, coming from the Midwest and California before that, are the sharply drawn, heavily defining class lines. You can feel that it matters what your background is to people in that part of the country. While it is refreshing to be in a place where intellectualism is generally respected, it is annoying how that appreciation always seems to come with a measurement of rank (what university you’re associated with, etc.).

Walking into the Sloane building at the kickoff of the conference, what was most noticeable was the way that people looked. Black clothing, trendy eyewear, and hip messenger bags created an impression of with-it-ness and sexiness that matched the paper abstracts on the website. Beginning to speak with people personally, though, I quickly realized that, more than hip and sexy, this was a crowd of extremely interesting and dynamic individuals.

Listening to papers over a couple of days, I did notice a certain degree of academic vanity and ego that is an underlying issue in academia, perhaps more at MIT6 than in some other places, because of the sexiness of the subject matter. You could hear the effort that many of the young scholars put into stringing together impressive and artful sentences, and I felt a little embarrassed to recognize my own writing priorities in theirs (since those artful sentences could have been written just as clearly without the showiness). I think it is a rare person who pursues a profession as an intellectual who can remain uncorrupted by the issues of ego and vanity that run through academia.

The conference, since it was so much about what is new and changing, had the feel of young intellectuals staking their claims, but not everyone there was young. The inter-generational dynamic was important. There were a number of well established senior faculty who held forth and got respect, but sometimes seemed to be struggling to keep up with the pace of change that younger academics at the conference were aggressively pushing forward with papers on Youtube and how it has reshaped things, etc. To get a sense of the energy of the young scholars at the conference, take a look at the action on Twitter over the past few days.

While there were a lot of women at the conference, there were few minorities, and some women noted how male-dominated the large-scale discussions tended to be. This is despite gender and multiculturalism frequently appearing as aspects of presented papers.

As a librarian, and not a professor or a grad student, and not immersed in media studies, I felt somewhat outside of the intellectual currents that flowed through the conference. Thankfully, it was an interdisciplinary-enough event that most people were less than totally familiar with the discourse that underlay most others’ papers, which put everyone in more or less the same boat, at least part of the time. That said, I definitely felt aware of my own non-specialist, perhaps dilettante-ish approach to scholarly discourse. I like having the freedom to engage in an idea briefly, communicate an original thought to someone who might make use of it, and move on. My interests are too wide-ranging to focus on a topic for years on end the way a professor is required to do. I can only admire the work that many of the academics at this conference put into developing their ideas about new media into solid works that might have an influence on the way society solves problems or navigates the way forward, but I am also glad that that is not a part of my job description. I don’t have quite the attention span or temperament for it.

One of the MIT Communications Forum members who kicked off the conference on Friday said that there were over 300 papers being presented. The abstracts and many of the actual papers are online on the MIT6 site – I encourage you to peruse them. Over the course of the weekend I found the energy and sheer volume of discussion and ideas to be overwhelming, so that Sunday morning my head was spinning, and I sat out that day’s sessions. The conference was larger than expected, and attracted so many bright, original young thinkers who want to push ahead with social research about new media and the web that I am left with the impression that this may have been a landmark conference – if not delineating then at least marking a point of fruition and maturity in studies of new, social media, Web 2.0 and the like. The conference was at MIT, and the book table showing MIT Press’ new publications in the area of new media and related topics was a further indication of the what a state of fruition this area of study is in. Take a look at the MIT Press website to see what I mean.

I mentioned that I felt somewhat an outsider at the conference because of my reading interests and work role. Making me feel further outside, or against, the current, was the fact that this conference was very much about the future – speculating about what it will be as well as creating it – while I am often more interested in what we can learn from the past. The sheer volume and energy of the ideas about the future and the rapidly transforming present made me feel my age, and I’m not that old yet.

When I go to conferences, I like to think about what questions are set to emerge but are only suggested in the papers and discussions. One set of questions that I think we will begin to face in librarianship concerns the death of the public sphere and the emergence of disparate publics, and how these relate to social media and digital archives. Many presenters worked from the assumption of a public sphere (whether their ideas concerned journalism, archives, youtube, or communities that would form around electronic books). The question of “publics” versus “the public” did come up explicitly in the question/ answer period following a session about the “new civic journalism,” where Patricia Aufdferheide and Mary Bryson debated Afderheide’s deliberate use of the term “publics” in a way that referred to an ultimate appeal to a broader public sphere were social problems can be communicated and refereed. The sheer volume of communication, and the sharp differences between potential audiences, made me wonder if such a public sphere is possible any longer (I’m very late in doubting it), and how access to discussion about texts will end up being negotiated – how social media groups will form or be formed and access to their discussions regulated.

The ideas that circulated at this conference will, I believe, eventually find their way into our smaller pond of library studies, and I believe we will have many uses for them. I recommend the MIT6 archive of presented papers as a store of ideas.

I did find myself wishing, on a number of occasions, that more LIS people were present. For example, there was a lot of interest and discussion of digital archives and the role of the archive in society, but no academics who could speak to the issues in archival theory and archival appraisal that were glossed over by speakers, who seemed almost unaware that such a discipline exists. In the first plenary discussion, for example, there was an unquestioned assumption that archivists want to keep everything, with no reference made to archival appraisal, which was very much at issue.

This conference really wore me out. I think I will pass on the next one, but I hope it is attended by more librarians and archivists than this one was.

If you’re like me, you work in a library that is facing tough decisions (no irony intended by that cliché phrase) as a result of budget cuts during the economic crisis. The choice between cutting staff and cutting the budget for materials is the easy one – protect the people who work in the library and do with less than an adequate budget for books and videos until things turn around.

Beyond that the decisions begin to get more difficult, because acquisitions budgets were already tight before the economy entered into a recession.

I would like to emphasize what I believe is an important consideration as we think this problem through, one based on the long view and the preservation function of libraries. I can see us looking back on this period 20 years from now, and being saddened by a tragic hole that exists in the written record because of a lack of funds for collecting certain materials for some number of years. What kinds of materials might we end up wishing we had collected but now find it tempting to cut out of the budget? In terms of preservation, it is most likely going to be materials that aren’t collected and preserved by a major research library, which probably means materials published in your own region or locality, or in a specialty that is unique to your institution. For example, if you are paying to have a local or regional newspaper microfilmed or digitized, there may be no one else doing it if you discontinue that activity now. If you’re considering discontinuing a print subscription to something obscure that has an important role in the activities of your own faculty because it’s been picked up by an aggregator, you should consider that the written record may ultimately depend on your maintaining that print subscription. And to make matters more difficult, institutions aren’t sharing much information with each other at present about what they are considering cutting.

What I want to point out is that our preservation role is at its most important during those times when it’s hardest to maintain, because others, under the same pressures, may not be doing the job.

Richard J. Cox has posted a review of John Ridener’s From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory.

Thanks to Dr. Cox for the review.

The African Studies Center with MATRIX digital humanities center at Michigan State University’s announce the launch of the new African Activist Archive Project (http://africanactivist.msu.edu).

This project is preserving records and memories of activism in the United States that supported the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s. This is one of the most significant modern American movements having defeated the foreign policy of a sitting President (Ronald Reagan), whose veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 was overturned by Congress, signaling the end of U.S. government support for the apartheid government. And it was based in more than 100 local community, university, religious, NGO, and labor organizations as well as city, county, and state governments.

The project is assembling excellent materials for teaching about community mobilizations, including:

• an online archive of historical materials – pamphlets, newsletters, leaflets, buttons, posters, T-shirts, photographs, and audio and videorecordings
  
• personal remembrances and interviews with activists
  
• a directory to the many archives of organizations and individuals deposited in libraries and historical societies that are available for further research

The earliest documents on the website are about the 1962 American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa which included Martin Luther King, Jr. and other key civil rights leaders of that time. The website also includes documents of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, Winnie Mandela Solidarity Coalition, and the Pan-African Liberation Committee at Harvard University. Among the audio materials is Harry Belafonte welcoming African National Congress President Oliver Tambo to a 1987 reception in New York.

The website now contains 1350 items of all types of media, including

• more than 800 documents
• 19 streaming videos and 11 streaming audio files
• a new T-shirt collection – with up to four images of each (with more T-shirts coming in the months ahead) and
• galleries of posters, photos, and buttons

There is representation from many organizations from across the country – 74 US organizations, most of them local groups, in 21 states and the District of Columbia. We have newsletters from 18 organizations, brief descriptions of more than 100 US organizations, and information about many physical archives.

There are many ways to navigate around the site. You can start from Galleries (including Remembrances or types of media, e.g. photos, documents, video) or begin on the Browse page with the organization name, a U.S. state, or the African country that is the focus of organizing. The Advanced Search page allows you to search across all types of media. Also, from each page displaying an item (e.g. photo, document, video), you can link to other items of the same organization or of the same African country of focus.

We are eager to communicate with people who have activist materials that they might wish to have included in this online archive. The project would particularly like to document more solidarity work by African American organizations. Donations of physical archives also are possible to the MSU Library’s expanding African Activist Archive Special Collections. If interested, please contact Project Director Richard Knight in New York (rknight1@juno.com) or MSU director David
Wiley (wiley@msu.edu).

Richard J. Cox’s new book is Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, just out from Litwin Books this January.

I searched around and found a fairly recent article by Dr. Cox that gets into some of the issues that he develops further in the book. If you’d like to get a taste for what you’ll find in parts of his new book, take a look at his November 2007 article in First Monday: “Machines in the archives: Technology and the coming transformation of archival reference.” …

From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory

Author: John Ridener
Price: $22.00
Published: February 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9802004-5-4
Printed on acid-free paper

From Polders to Postmodernism is a broad ranging history of the conception and development of the theories that have guided archivists in their work from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries. Narrated through the controversial thread of archival appraisal theory, the book examines how archivists have engaged with theory through the tension between keeping records that reflect objective history “as it happened” and subjective decision making in the archive. Through an interpretive reading of archival theory, distinct periods emerge, with each paradigm contributing unique responses to difficult archival, historical, and theoretical contexts.

The book is written within the framework of paradigm change and discusses archival theory in terms of geographical, historical, historiographical, and technological contexts. Through these contexts and discussion of luminary archival theories, the development of distinct periods within archival theory is illustrated. The periods and associated archivists include: Consolidation (Muller, Feith, and Fruin’s Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives), Reinforcement (Jenkinson’s A Manual of Archive Administration), Modern (Schellenberg’s Modern Archives), and Questioning (the work of five archivists: Brothman, Cook, Heald, Ketelaar, and MacNeil from 1991 to 2004).

Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling:
Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

Author: Richard J. Cox
Price: $35.00
Published: January 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9802004-7-8
Printed on acid-free paper

In Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, Richard J. Cox argues that personal archives might be assuming a new importance in society. As the technical means for creating, maintaining, and using documents are improving and becoming more cost-effective, individuals and families are seeking to preserve their old documents, especially traditional paper forms, as a connection to a past that may seem to be in risk of being of being swallowed up in the immense digital gadgetry in our Internet Age. There is a reversal to other technologies as well, such as leather bound journals and fountain pens, by some individuals resisting or protesting the increasingly digital world they reside in. Behind these very different approaches are similar impulses, and, these divergent paths raise identical questions about the role and purpose of traditional archives dating back two centuries and more. Personal recordkeeping raises a remarkable array of issues and concerns about records and their preservation, public or collective memory, the mission of professional records managers and archivists, the nature of the role of the institutional archives, and the function of the individual citizen as their own archivist. Archivists need to develop a new partnership with the public, and the public needs to learn from the archivists the essentials of preserving documentary materials. We are on the cusp of seeing a new kind of archival future, and whether this is good or bad depends on how well archivists equip citizen archivists.

(Publisher’s description)

From Lincoln Cushing to the PLG list:

The “Archives of Dissent” panel held at U.C. Berkeley 9/18/2008 can now be seen on YouTube:

It includes presentations by:

• Julie Herrada, Labadie Collection Librarian, University of Michigan, and curator of a “1968″ special exhibit. The Labadie Collection is an internationally renowned archive of social protest materials.

• Kalim Smith – UC Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology and folklore, researching the preservation of Native American languages threatened with extinction.

• Lincoln Cushing, independent librarian and Docs Populi archivist.

• Megan Shaw Prelinger & Rick Prelinger, co-founders of the Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly, image-rich, browsable research collection of 50,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents, located south of Market St in San Francisco.

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS (MIT site)

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes. His division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. Moore’s Law continues to hold, and with it a doubling of memory capacity every two years; we are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds.

Such developments are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace.

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers, writers and visual artists on these broad themes. Potential topics might include:

* The digital archive
* The future of libraries and museums
* The past and future of the book
* Mobile media
* Historical systems of communication
* Media in the developing world
* Social networks
* Mapping media flows
* Approaches to media history
* Education and the changing media environment
* New forms of storytelling and expression
* Location-based entertainment
* Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
* New modes of circulation and distribution
* The transformation of television — from broadcast to download
* Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
* Virtual worlds and digital tourism
* The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital transformation?
* The fate of reading

Submissions

Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers.

Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference Web site.

Please monitor the conference Web site at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6 for registration information, travel information and conference updates.

Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.
The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday, April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site and made available to all conferees.

Minerva Research Initiative: Searching for the Truth or Denying the Iraqis the Rights to Know the Truth?
by Saad Eskander, Iraq National Library and Archives

“What has prompted me to write this paper is the continuing refusal of the U.S. to pay serious attention to Iraqi calls for the repatriation of the Iraqi records illegally seized by its military and intelligence agencies. Most recently, the Pentagon has issued an announcement, calling upon U.S. universities, research centers and scholars to submit research proposals to its Minerva Research Initiative (MRI)…”

Thanks to Mark Rosenzweig for sending to multiple lists…

Dr. Richard J. Cox, head of the archives track at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, has posted a review of Lara Jennifer Moore’s Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Archives and Libraries in France. I find it an intelligent review that gives a clear sense of what Moore’s book is all about and the contribution that it makes. Thanks to Dr. Cox for his attentive reading.