Blog Action Day

This post is participating in Blog Action Day. The idea is that bloggers all over the world use one day a year to discuss a common topic. This year that topic is Poverty. The idea is to raise awareness, generate discussion, raise money (through the donation of blog ad revenue), and instigate change. I’m in favour of all these things, although to be honest I’m sceptical of how much real change will ever be made in the area of poverty. There has always been an imbalance between the rich and poor. Why should this change? Why does it exist in the first place? It seems to me that people living in poverty are there through the greed and selfishness of others, namely those who make the rules, wield the power, have the wealth, own the land and property, dictate how the money flows, have access to education, and generally are in a position to choose their own life-styles and life-views and to not give a damn about their fellow human beings. Sometimes poverty leads to death. Sometimes it leads to revolution.

I’m supposed to post about poverty as it relates to the theme of my blog. So, poverty and archives….

There has been a dedicated movement during the last couple of years to get world governments to seriously tackle the problem of poverty, both in their own countries and on an international scale. This will be documented in newspapers, government policy papers, live aid videos, etc. But a lot of material will be lost because it originates from small, grass level movements that are run by volunteers, that exist for a couple of years (or less) and then disappear. Many of these groups operate in electronic environments, relying on the internet and email to get their messages across and to communicate with their membership and the wider public. As archivists, how can we identify, collect and preserve the records of these groups? Should we even try? Is this our role?

Well I could write a bit more about that, but there are other angles to poverty and archives. People living in poverty have to worry about food, shelter, fresh water, education, heating, access to medicine, and other basics of survival. How many of the truly impoverished visit our institutions? How do our outreach programmes tackle this? The Archives Awareness Campaign for 2008 is “Take your place in history”. How does the position of the poverty-stricken fit into this? (I don’t mean to critique the Awareness Campaign, which, by the way, I think is brilliant.) But, poor people exist in history and always have and many of them make it into archives only via government statistics, or studies on social and health conditions. I suspect not many institutions contain the personal collections of families or individuals living in poverty. What records are they creating anyway?

This last thought really is my way of getting to the point that poverty excludes people from a full engagement with archival collections, both as creators and as readers. This lack of engagement denies them a connection with their history, their culture, their identity, the memories of their communities and ancestors, and all the other wonderful ways that archives enrich our lives and our feelings of personal identity and belonging.

Poverty sucks. It should be done away with.