Review of the conference 2

As mentioned before, I felt that the conference favoured access over preservation. This actually mirrors a trend I’ve noticed in UK archivists – an inclination toward access as the sole, or most important, aim of archives. Without access, it’s asked, what is the point of saving anything at all? Thus outreach activities are seen as the most vital thing, overshadowing the other core archival functions of collecting, appraising, cataloguing/describing and preserving.

OK, it would be sacrilegious of me to deny the importance of access. But I think we need to put this back into context, especially in relation to digital material. It seems to me that we’re constantly informing people that digitisation should form part of a comprehensive preservation strategy. Yet, we don’t seem as proud of our preservation work as we do of the access that comes from it. But mainly, preservation allows access to happen and we should allocate it the bulk of our efforts.

If I can use this to lead onto another point, this fixation with access also limits the ways in which we define our profession. It was pointed out several times during the conference that archivists have a difficult time articulating the value of archival work. Peter Emmerson noted this in his opening speech, urging us to re-think why archives are important and to extend our concept of who benefits. I think that by focusing on access as our reason for being we limit the ways we can express our value to benefiting the small number of people who consciously use us. As Professor Jimerson pointed out, almost nobody will make a connection between archives and records managers and the document trail behind current events such as the release of the convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Yet our profession is responsible for good government records management, via TNA.

These are my preliminary thoughts.