The Association of Canadian Archivists Student Chapter at the University of British Columbia (ACA@UBC) is delighted to present its ninth annual international Seminar and Symposium, Managing the Analogue, which will be held at UBC from February 9 to 10, 2017.
International in scope, the Seminar and Symposium will include both traditional and forward-thinking perspectives on analogue materials residing in archival spaces. In a time where our archival backlogs are steadily increasing, questions must be asked about how we can manage an often overwhelming amount of physical records. Furthermore, in an increasingly digital world, archives must have a solid understanding of how to regulate analogue materials before they can hope to proficiently and effectively manage digital records.
Analogue records are often considered to be the oldest materials in an archival repository and act as a portal to history. As such, it is an archives’ duty to ensure that analogue records from all time periods, such as documents, books, audiovisual materials, maps, and works of art, are properly cared for and that history, no matter how recent, is not forgotten. In our attempts to manage the analogue, we must respect the past but also look ahead to the future and try to understand how these documents can be made to stand the test of time.
Opening Remarks: Matthew Evenden, Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts
We are gathering in what could be described as an archive of place. This theatre was built in 1963 and named after the founder of the university’s players club. Across the street there is a second-growth forest, which sprang to life in the shelter of a university after many parts of the peninsula were clear-cut in the early twentieth century, making way for an ecological succession of buildings and roads. Down the hill, next to the storied and architecturally impressive Museum of Anthropology, stands a concrete gun mount, a remnant from the Second World War, standing guard against an ocean invasion. Surrounding all of this is land and water, the Fraser River delta to the south, the entrance to Burrard Inlet to the north, which we look at from atop crumbling limestone cliffs, palimpsests of another kind, hosting culturally marked trees, indigenous sites, fishing stations, reminders that we meet on land which has, in global terms, been relatively quickly converted from long-standing indigenous uses after a history of colonial dispossession. This place remains contested, the unceded, ancestral territory of Musqueam, and the lands we see across the waters of the Squamish and the Tsleil-Waututh, all of them our generous hosts.
An archive of place is a phrase I borrow from William Turkel, whose book of that name wrestled with the material traces we find in the world as evidence of past events.1 I am sympathetic to his metaphorical appropriation of the language of the archive to think of past human actions in landscape and environments as akin to human writing and textual inscriptions. The world as an archive is an idea that recognizes the centrality of the archive as a human institution for preserving, protecting and pursuing knowledge, culture and memory.
While I am a scholar who writes about human interactions with environments in the past and conducts field work, I find it difficult to draw many conclusions to the questions I ask without reference to archival evidence. To analyze and understand place as an archive requires actual reference to archives, repositories both analog and digital, perhaps increasingly hybrid. My most recent archival foray took place in Sweden, at the Lund University Archives, a marvellously welcoming and well-organized facility. While I poured over letters from a Swedish scientist to colleagues in Newfoundland about the introduction of species to the island from Europe, I sat next to others leafing through brittle early twentieth century newspapers and somewhat sturdier medieval illuminated manuscripts. There is nothing quite like the feel and texture of such archival documents. While like everyone else I have benefited from the avalanche of archival materials placed in digital form, my strong preference as a researcher, when time and money allows, is to leaf through the original. Perhaps I am simply revealing my age, as many of my students now treat archives like photography studios. They enter, identify and shoot. Fragments of the archive as jpegs are then converted into PDFs and shipped home to await reading another time. Are we becoming more efficient or deferring our thinking to a time and location when we can no longer follow up a lead or talk to an archivist about how one collection might connect with another? When we search digital collections online, especially machine readable collections, using tempting search functions, have we progressed, unearthing new sources and connections that were unachievable when we read and flipped, or have we forgotten about the importance of context and the unpredictable finds which turn up accidentally in a file while looking for something else. I’m sure there is no one answer, but if I struggle with these problems as a researcher, and wonder how to guide my students as the analogue and the digital interact in sometimes complementary fashion, sometimes awkward tension, I can only imagine the challenge as faced by archivists.
And this is before we even address the problem with preservation in a digital world. Some years ago I remember finding in the Rockefeller Foundation Archives a wonderful and unusual record. Officers of the foundation were charged with keeping a phone diary. In it, they recorded many of those conversations that were normally lost to historians. The evidence was amazing but also reinforced for me that most of the time, I had no record of nor reference to telephone conversations in my research. The silence of the past was the norm. With the explosion of digital traces, websites, email, and social media—all of them morphing and changing, deploying new code, updating content, transforming like a legendary trickster from one thing to another, what are archives to do? What traces does one preserve from the big data of the digital revolution? When I was a student, one prescient professor suggested that in the future students should be allowed to substitute a foreign language exam for a working knowledge of a defunct computer program. I’m not sure that suggestion was ever taken up, but my professor anticipated at least one of the problems that both archivists and researchers share.
The technical challenges are one part of this, but there are wider social and political dimensions. What is to be saved, by whom and for whom? What policies will governments develop to archive the record of controversial decisions and the routine workings of government? What does access to information mean in theory and practice? When budgets are tight, how will resources be meted out to records management, particularly when some governments wish the records would just go away?
What a pleasure to welcome you to the University of British Columbia for the 9th Annual Association of Canadian Archivists International Symposium. UBC and the Faculty of Arts are thrilled to host this conference, we are proud of the work our colleagues in the iSchool do both as researchers and as teachers of the next generation of archives professionals in the Masters of Archival Studies program. We are pleased to have you join us in this archive of place under less than ideal weather conditions to wrestle with the challenges which impact your own professional lives and practices, but also the capacity of researchers like me to do our work, and of society more generally to find practical ways to access evidence of the past, to learn about cultural histories, warts and all, and to use that knowledge to imagine other, perhaps better, futures. We don’t know what we will need to know about the past in the future, which is why you all play such a crucial role in helping us to think through that problem. On a personal note, it is a particular privilege for me to welcome you today since I have benefited from the kindness of archivists my whole professional life, and, if things go well, plan to keep doing so. One rarely finds the appropriate moment to say thank you, but here is one—so, thank you, and best of luck for a spirited set of talks and conversations ahead.