ARCHIVES AND ARCHIVISTS
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"Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people." - Heinrich Heine
Why are archives important?
- Accountability: for a democratic society
to function, people need to know what their leaders really are
doing
- Easy access to information
Who uses archives?
- journalists
- researchers (i.e. historians, political scientists, etc.)
- planners
- genealogists
- community activists
- civil servants
- anyone who wants to learn from the past
Why are archivists important?
- Your guides to the Information Age: why feel
overwhelmed when there are people who can help you find just the information you need, when you need it, WITHOUT wasting time searching through irrelevant material.
What do archivists do?
- appraise historically valuable documents: a document can
be on paper, CD, audio or videocassette, clay tablets, or any
other form of disseminating information. The information is
important, not its format.
- preserve historically valuable documents.
- create Finding Aids: a Finding Aid is basically your "roadmap" to the Information Age. It can be as simple as a list of all the material available in the Archive. Or it can be as sophisticated as a computer database. More and more Archives are making their Finding Aids available through the Internet.
- provide reference service:
- analyzes: The groundrule of archival science is that the archive must mirror the creating organisation, person or group. An archivist makes a system analysis of how the records creator.
- organize
- instructs patrons in the use of Finding Aids and archival materials:
- create displays
Erin's musings:
Archives versus guns? You decide!
One of the two archives in which I worked in 1999 is in a filthy basement. Another part of the basement is used as storage for the local Civil Defense and is kept locked at all times. The archive also is kept locked. I am under the impression that the CD storage contains guns, although I don't know this for certain. This situation has stimulated me to ponder the following:
Who/what is the real "defender of democracy?"
Mao stated that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. (So maybe the guns are more important than the archive)
But, Mao was not exactly Mr. Democracy, either.
AK-47s are relatively cheap and easy to manufacture. Military organizations are hierarchical and authoritarian. (So maybe the gunwielders are inherently anti-democratic?)
In order for democracy to function, people need both well-developed analytical thinking skills and access to information. An archive contains information.
I think the strongest argument for the importance of Archives (and also
Libraries) is the fact that one of the first things totalitarians do is
deny access to them. Both rightwing and leftwing extremists begin by burning
books, closing Archives, denying access to or even destroying all evidence
of opinions other than their own. Ironically, it is in the so-called democratic
societies that one hears of the supposed unimportance of "a bunch of old
papers."
Archival and historical links in English
my resume
Last updated 2005-12-13.
Ett bibliotek samlar men arkivet måste speglas arkivbildaren. Detta är grundprincip av allt arkivarbete! Det betyder, bl. a., att ett arkiv är mer än en samling av gamla pappren.
Arkiven är viktigt för:
- Offentligheten
- Tolkning av museiföremål
- Lokalkännedom
Länkar:
Senast uppdaterad 2005-12-13.
min meritförteckning
Erin Winslow
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