I recently attended a small day-long symposium put on by FSU’s Center for Everyday Writing (doesn’t have a web presence yet, but will soon), and even presented on the topic of “Curating Archives” along with my colleague Ben Yadon. The event was archives-centric, in fact titled “Archives with a View,” and while the majority of those present and present were not, in fact, archivists at a professional level there was a great deal of thought-provoking discussion about archives and archiving and the study of historical objects.
If you want to know the qualifier that separates “archival practice” from archiving as a hobby, it is the concept of “weeding.” That is the process by which an archivist thins a collection of documents by throwing away items deemed unimportant, either historically or in relation to the subject matter. For instance, in collections of personal papers, a lot of time the household bills, cancelled checks, or common receipts (groceries, for instance) are thrown out.
People who are not trained in archival methodology find this inexcusable. Personally, I find it incredibly tragic but there are valid reasons for it: space, time, and money. Talk for thirty seconds to any professional archivist and the lamentations of budget shortfalls, short staffing, cramped vault space and backlogs will come up. Repeatedly. With vigor. Archivists don’t weed a collection because we are arrogant or foolish, but because we don’t have room, time, or money to deal with it intact. It’s a profoundly practical consideration to a deeply philosophical question: by what standards are the future understandings of the past being created today?
And there is the rub, as they say, because while lip service is given to this issue in archival training, it is not really being addressed at the ground level. Or I should say, the theoretical level.
Theory is a given quite the fish-eye in LIS circles, in my experience. There is a strong defense that the FSU program has a solid theoretical component, but I question that. I believe there is a lot of “that word does not mean what you think it means” in that defense. Honestly, the archivists and librarians I work with do not want to discuss theory; they feel that is the purview of the Humanities and History departments. Archivists and librarians have a job to do. Theory is for the aesthetes.
But the question of weeding is and should be addressed as both a practical solution and as a philosophical quandary. We are affectively reshaping the future with our necessary decisions; future scholars will not thank us for preserving what we have saved if what they need has been discarded.
It is all well and good to focus on archiving as a functional role that requires specific criteria for processing and management, but we are absolving ourselves of a core responsibility if we refuse to address this issue with the disingenuous justification that theory is not our purview. The reasons why are vitally important to what we do and how we do it, and not simply at the level of “for the sake of posterity.”
Librarians face up to this from the direction of acquisition of books/journals/magazines, although with a less severe consequence if they choose based on current fads or erroneous assumptions. A librarian’s focus is by necessity the immediate need of the community they serve; an archivist differs in that the community served is both present (researchers using the archive) and future (researchers using the archive 10, 20, 50, 100+ years from today).
But there is no “theory of weeding” that I’m aware of. It is always presented as a practice with a purpose which is determined by the specific collection being processed, rather than as a grand statement to the future of what we consider to be important today. We should not be proud of the power we are wielding in determining the future; we should be humbled by it, study it, question it, and theorize about our choices.
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