Terry Cook, from the University of Manitoba was with us to discuss his thoughts on “Missing Piece or First Responsibility: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future.” I’m always interested to hear what TC has to say. I can’t always claim to agree with everything he says, but I always come away thinking more about what it is that I do, and whether I should think about it more. I’ve felt since I studied that for far too many archivists in the UK, there simply isn’t the time to sit down and contemplate the intellectual aspects of their day job. With funding in short supply, and increasing demands on archive services, fewer and fewer archivists, records managers and other information professionals will increasingly lack the time and space to do this. I digress.
TC advocated that “as archivists, we must constantly remind ourselves of the gravity of our task. We are what we do not keep, what we exclude, marginalise, destroy” I certainly agree that it is hard, if not impossible to de-politicise appraisal. It is important that politics of appraisal are not passed off as insignificant.
Rightly, TC reiterated that archives are not just a historical bastion, but they support human rights, democratic accountability and provide evidence for many past crimes. This is the crux of it as far as I am concerned. And it’s a message which makes the ears of the Great, Good and Powerful prick up. Transparency matters, and it’s a major policy under the new administration. Therefore, archives should and must matter. I was also in agreement with his discussion of macro appraisal as more than functional analysis: it documents the functionality of government, creation of citizens and their interaction with the state, which in turn enables us to ensure that collections celebrate the corporate and local, the personal and the national, those who are not given an archive voice, an archival integrity. In TC’s own words, “archives must not become weathervanes, moving to the various winds of historiography.”
