Two archival canons

ABSTRACT

This paper compares and contrasts two very different strands within the archival canon: the archival science strand whose leading lights include Jenkinson, Schellenberg, Scott, Duranti, Bearman and Upward; and the post-modern strand initiated by the publication of Derrida’s Archive Fever and including Harris, Caswell and Cifor among its leading lights. The post-modern perspective has become the dominant research perspective in archival schools across the English speaking world. However a post-modernist theory of how records systems work has yet to emerge and thus there is no post-modernist approach to records management. For these reasons the archival science perspective continues to be important, particularly to institutional archives. The differences between the post-modern perspective and the archival science perspective are illustrated by comparing their attitudes to the thought of Sir Hilary Jenkinson. Jenkinson’s argument that archivists should neutrally preserve the records that an originating organisation had relied on to perform their most important tasks is inadmissible from a post-modern perspective, which requires an archivist to take a much more engaged approach. However the fact that reliable records are very much a ‘double-edged sword’ for an originating organisation means that Jenkinson’s idea of archival neutrality is not necessarily a regressive notion. This paper argues that the post-modern perspective is particularly useful for collecting archives, but that institutional archives will still need the understanding of how record systems work that comes with the archival science perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• archival theory
• records management theory
• Jenkinson

Introduction

The two aspects of Jenkinson’s thought that have drawn the most criticism in the preceding articles in this volume are his advocacy of archival neutrality and the connection of his recordkeeping theories with British colonial recordkeeping practice. This contribution explores both these questions in the context of the wider archival canon(s).

The archival canon(s)

The post-modern archival canon

In 1997, Verne Harris identified a split in archival thought between the post-modern perspective and what he called the pre-post-modern perspective.¹ The post-modern archival perspective draws its inspiration from Derrida’s Archive Fever, which had been translated into English just one year previously.² Its leading lights, alongside Harris, include Caswell and Cifor.³ The concerns of the post-modern perspective are centred around identity, power differentials, social justice, and the role of archives in shaping memory and combatting erasures and silencing. There is no place for neutrality in this perspective.

In the quarter of a century since Harris’ article, the post-modern perspective has accumulated a formidable volume of work and has become the dominant perspective in archival schools across the English-speaking world. In effect, it has brought into being a new archival canon.

The archival science canon

Harris labelled the previously existing archival perspective/canon as being ‘pre-post-modern’ which seems to imply it would be replaced by the post-modern perspective. In fact, the post-modern perspective has not been able to entirely replace the ‘pre-post-modern perspective.’ There is, for example, as yet no post-modern records management theory. We therefore need a name for the pre-existing perspective that goes some way to explain both why it has been challenged by the post-modern perspective, and why it has continued to exist despite that challenge. I would propose calling it the ‘archival science perspective.’

The central concerns of the archival science perspective are the operation of record systems across time and space, and across the boundary between an originating organization (or person) and an archive. Jenkinson made the first English language contribution to this canon. Its other leading lights include Schellenberg, Scott, Duranti, Bearman, and Upward. The concept of archival neutrality still has a place within this perspective.

By exploring what Jenkinson meant by neutrality, we can seek to address the question of whether there is still a place for neutrality in archival practice, and if so why that place exists and where it exists. The answer to this question will also tell us something about the boundary line between those areas of archival/recordkeeping activity which are best informed by the post-modern perspective and those areas which are best informed by the archival science perspective.

Jenkinson and British colonial recordkeeping practice

The post-modern canon is also a post-colonial canon. Of all the thinkers in the archival science canon, Jenkinson is the one most vulnerable to the label ‘colonial.’ In 1906, when Jenkinson joined the staff of the Public Record Office (PRO) in London’s Chancery Lane, Britain possessed the largest colonial empire in history.

We have two choices with Jenkinson. We could see him as a contributor to purely British (and purely colonial) archival tradition, or we could see him as contributing to the development of a global archival science whose theories, like Maxwell’s equations relating electric fields to magnetic fields or Darwin’s theory of evolution, have a relevance and usefulness that go beyond the cultural tradition in which they happened to be discovered.

The oft-quoted description of the PRO Chancery Lane (where Jenkinson spent almost the entirety of his career) as ‘the strong box of empire’ coupled with the fact that the registry systems of the British colonial administrations are often called ‘Jenkinsonian,’ appears to back up the view that Jenkinson established a specifically colonial archival tradition.⁴ The next two sections examine these two assumptions.

Public Record office (PRO) Chancery Lane—strong box of empire?

It is easy to see why the PRO Chancery Lane was called ‘the strong box of empire.’ It has some claim to being the first purpose built national archive repository in the world. Its walls were as thick as those of a fortress. It was built in the 1850s when Britain’s advantage of being the first industrialized nation had yet to be hauled back by the USA and Germany.

The reality is more prosaic. The Chancery Lane repository was built to protect a point of vulnerability rather than to radiate power. Britain was proud of having ‘the mother of parliaments’ but the records of the House of Commons had been lost in a fire in 1834. The contents of two record storage rooms were purposefully incinerated to create space for a new law court but the bonfire raged out of control and engulfed the whole palace of Westminster.⁵

The consequences of the fire could have been even worse. The Palace of Westminster was then even closer to Westminster Abbey than it is now. At one point, people feared that the Abbey would go up in flames as well. An integral part of Westminster Abbey was the Chapter House. Despite being a jewel of gothic architecture, the Chapter House had been used as a record store, housing Exchequer records, since the reformation nearly three centuries before. In amongst the records in the Chapter House was the Domesday Book — undoubtedly the single most important archival item in the custody of the Crown. The Chapter House and the Domesday Book narrowly survived the fire. Four years later, Parliament passed legislation which brought into being the PRO.⁶ The new repository in Chancery Lane would open two decades after that.

Records were decanted into the PRO Chancery Lane from the various locations they had been stored, including from the Rolls Chapel, the Wakefield Tower of the Tower of London, the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey, and the New State Paper Office (which itself had been created to take state papers from various parts of the Palace of Whitehall).

The PRO Chancery Lane was neither a strong box nor a powerhouse of empire. It was a repository intended mainly for medieval and early modern records. It had few powers over the rest of government. Even in Jenkinson’s time, the PRO could not tell government departments what records they must deposit with them or when, and could not compel departments to allow public access to the records that they transferred.⁷

Jenkinson and the registry systems of British colonial administrations

The registry systems used by British colonial administrations were Jenkinsonian only in the sense that Jenkinson provided a detailed description of their operation in his Manual of Archival Administration.⁸ Jenkinson had not invented them. He did not design them. He merely provided a scientific explanation as to why they proved so effective.

The recordkeeping practice of the British administration, at home and in the colonies, was based around registries. Registries were places where registry clerks maintained the files of the administration in sophisticated registered file series. They intercepted incoming items of post to ensure they were properly filed before delivering the relevant file (with the new item on top) to the addressee. Jenkinson’s explanation for the success of these systems was that most records consisted of correspondence — documents moving from one organization to another or moving internally around an organization. Any record system that intercepted correspondence as it moved was likely to prove extremely reliable.⁹ This is not a specifically British insight, it is not a specifically colonial insight; it is a scientific insight. The ongoing relevance of this insight was demonstrated at the start of the digital age when the records management community tried an international experiment with electronic document and records management (EDRM) systems. These systems were specified to the highest possible records management rigour, but they sat independently of the communications tools (such as e-mail systems) through which documents and messages were sent, received, stored, read, re-read, replied to, and referred to. It did not prove feasible for organizations to establish consistent routines to reliably capture correspondence into them.¹⁰ The experiment failed at great cost.

Jenkinson’s concept of archival neutrality

Neutrality in relation to different types of archive

We can distinguish between three types of archives: institutional archives, collecting archives, and a new type of archive: a constructed (or curating) archive.

• The scope of an institutional archive is limited to the records created and received by the institution(s) within their remit.

• A collecting archive has a much wider scope than an institutional archive and is limited only by the range of their collecting policy and by resource constraints. Collecting archivists are however still the passive recipient of collections originated by others.

• A constructed archive is created by an archivist, or co-created by an archivist with the community to whom the archive relates. The archivist, builds the collection up item by item, like a museum collection. In the digital world, and with the help of automation, this can be done at scale. This is the archivist in the role of curator (or the curator in the guise of an archivist). The items have no organic relation to each other until they enter the constructed archive and are put into relation with each other by the archivist. We have seen two examples of such archives in this volume. Other examples are described by Caswell and Cifor.¹¹

These three types of archivist are not in opposition to each other. Society needs all three types. It needs institutional archives to help hold institutions historically accountable. Collecting and constructed archives are needed to ensure the experience of a diversity of different groups in the society is preserved. An archivist can play any combination of these roles in their career, but it is important for them to know which role they are playing at any one time and what archival perspective is most useful to that role.

An archivist constructing an archival collection from scratch (perhaps to counter a historical erasure or to create space for the survival of the experience of a marginalized or disadvantaged group) is outside the scope of Jenkinsonian archival science. There is no original order to the items that predates the accession of the items into the archive. There is no point in such an archivist pretending to be neutral — there are no pre-existing structures or relationships in the records for them to neutrally preserve.

Neutrality is still relevant to the work of the institutional archivist. Records are double-edged swords for the institutions that create and keep them. They help those institutions carry out their work (whether that work is for pure motives, mixed motives, or corrupt motives) and they help researchers hold that institution (historically) accountable for that work. The role of archivists and records managers is to help ensure the survival of these double-edged swords. Archival neutrality is both legitimate and helpful in this situation.

Neutrality and the original order of records

Jenkinson argued that the structure in which records were kept and managed gave evidence of the organic relationship between the work of an organization and the records that arise from that work.¹² The role of the archivist was to preserve both the records themselves and the original structure (order) of the records, regardless of whether or not the archivist believed that it was a good structure and regardless of whether the archivist believed the structure in question would be a help or hindrance to future generations of researchers.¹³ The neutrality that Jenkinson advocated was a technical neutrality not a political one. It was a neutrality toward the type of recordkeeping structures that an administration deployed, and a neutrality toward the uses to which future generations of researchers might want to put the records.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the State Paper Office had kept the papers of the English/British Secretaries of State. Successive archivists in the State Paper Office and then the PRO had reordered the papers without keeping any record of the original rearrangement.¹⁴ In the process, there was a loss of evidence of how the Secretaries of State worked and of the relationships between individual records. Jenkinson’s insistence on the importance of original order was in part a reaction to such folly.¹⁵

Neutrality in relation to the records relied on by officials

When Jenkinson argued that the best record of an official’s work was the record that the official themselves relied on when they carried out that work, he was not arguing that an official was neutral or had some privileged viewpoint. Instead he was pointing out that the official involved in carrying out a piece of work had both the motive and opportunity to ensure that they possessed a good record of the work that they were involved in. It was this need of an official for a good record of their own work that meant that the record they relied on was likely to be reliable to a researcher.

Jenkinson’s regard for the record used by officials was not a homage to them, nor was it a bid to perpetuate their power or their world view. It was a recognition that it is difficult to hold an administration to account if you do not have access to the same records that their officials used when they carried out the work/provided the policy advice/took the steps that you are investigating. Jenkinson warned that any record that an originating organization created especially for future researchers/historians was likely to be fundamentally less reliable than records created for (and used by) the people who carried out the work. This was a lesson that the archives and records community largely ignored at the start of the digital age when we looked to preserve the safe (but sterile) records kept in electronic document and records management systems rather than the messy but rich correspondence stored in e-mail accounts — despite the fact that e-mail accounts generally provided the main day-to-day source of reference for action officers.

Conclusion

The archival science canon is centred around the concerns of institutional archives. Running through that canon is a shared interest in understanding the entire lifecycle/continuum of records. In this canon, recordkeeping systems are studied dispassionately as the canon seeks to develop and refine explanations of how such systems can be sustained through organizational, legislative and technological change.

The post-modern canon that has emerged in the quarter century since Derrida’s Archive Fever is centred on the concerns of collecting rather than institutional archives. The collecting archivist has less need than the institutional archivist for a scientific understanding of record systems. They are not typically seeking to enable the organization/persons/community they collect records of to be historically accountable to the rest of society.

The post-modern perspective brings with it the energizing possibility of an archivist being able to adopt a politically engaged stance and being able to go some way to redress erasures of people and communities. But it lacks an explanation of how recordkeeping systems work and this absence places a limit on the influence it can have on day-to-day recordkeeping practice in originating organizations and institutional archives.

It is clear how the post-modern perspective can contribute to the thinking of an archive whose purpose is to give voice to those who might otherwise be silenced. It is less clear how this perspective can help the thinking of an institutional archive, which has as one of its core purposes that of enabling society to hold an administration historically accountable for the way it exercises power.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Lappin

James Lappin is a postgraduate researcher at Loughborough University's Centre for Information Management. He is researching archival policy towards email and is the lead author of 'Rival records management models in an era of partial-automation' that was published in the journal Archival Science in 2021.

Notes

1. Harris, “Claiming Less.”

2. Derrida, Archive Fever.

3. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights.”

4. Lawes, Chancery Lane 1377–1977.

5. Shenton, The Day Parliament Burned Down.

6. Public Record Office Act 1838.

7. Rock, “The Dreadful Flood of Documents,” 50.

8. Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration.

9. Ibid., 143.

10. Allan, Review of Government Digital Records; and Baron and Attfield, “Where Light in Darkness Lies,” 583.

11. See note 3 above.

12. Jenkinson, “The English Archivist,” 238.

13. Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, 82, 87; and Stapleton, “Jenkinson and Schellenberg,” 80.

14. Bevan, “State Papers of Henry VIII.”

15. Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, 68.