Plus ça change …? The Salutary Tale of the Telephone and its Implications for Archival Thinking about the Digital Revolution

Abstract

A digital revolution, it has been claimed, has transformed records management and archival practice, and raised the fear that the inability to capture information created via new media is leading to a significant loss in information secured for the future. In its own day, the invention and adoption of the telephone revolutionised long-distance communications, shifting many transactions to an oral medium which left little in the way of records. This paper will explore whether the advent of the digital era is the conceptual revolution that it is often claimed to be, based on an analogy with the advent of the telephone.

Notes

Loomis, ‘The Telephone Comes to Washington,’ p.26.

Loomis, ‘The Telephone Comes to Washington,’ p.26.

Unattributed, ‘Business and the Telephone, 1878,’ p.81.

Unattributed, ‘Business and the Telephone, 1878,’ p.83.

Perry, ‘The British Experience 1876–1912,’ p.70.

Perry, ‘The British Experience 1876–1912,’ p.72.

Perry, ‘The British Experience 1876–1912,’ pp.74–5 et seq.

BT Archive, POST 30/996D, ‘Post Office London Telephone System in the London Exchange Area,’ 1 May 1901.

BT Archive, uncatalogued publicity booklet, The History of Bell’s Telephone, 1878.

BT Archive, POST 30/996D, ‘Post Office Telephone System in the London Exchange Area, Memorandum of Progress,’ March 1902.

BT Archive, POST 30/1219C, letter, J.H. Cole to Postmaster General, 4 May 1883.

As reported in Unattributed, ‘Legal Business of the Government.’ I am grateful to one of the peer reviewers for this reference.

BT Archive, POST 30/1219C, folder entitled, ‘Office of Works to decline to provide speaking tubes in Future – Substitution of Telephones Suggested,’ 1904.

BT Archive, POST 30/2657C, T.L. Heath to Postmaster General, ‘Estimates for telephone services in Government Departments,’ 6 April 1912.

Twinn, ‘The Fairy of the Phone.’

See for example, Unattibuted, ‘The Telephone And Diseases of the Ear’; Unattributed, ‘The Telephone As A Source Of Infection.’ Unattributed, ‘The Telephone As A Cause Of Ear Troubles.’ Unattributed, ‘Infection By Telephone.’

Edison, ‘The Phonograph and Its Future,’ pp.534–6.

Young, Person to Person, p.41.

General Instructions for the Registration and Conduct of Correspondence in Military Offices (HMSO: London, 1912). In TNA T1/12334 Notes on Registry and Copying Branches, 1919.

Notes for the Use of Registry Branches (HMSO: London, 1919). In T1/12334 Notes on Registry and Copying Branches 1919.

Craig, ‘Rethinking Formal Knowledge and its Practices in the Organization,’ p.119.

See, for example, TNA T199/43 Committee on Registry and Departmental Clerical Records, Committee on Organisation of Central Registry and Clerical Section, Minutes of 1^st Meeting, Appendix, 1 April 1938. For general files on registry development, see for example, TNA T199/90 Re-organisation of the Treasury Registry System [c.1919–1921]; TNA T199/177, Organisation and Duties of Central Registry and Clerical Sections [1935–1948].

TNA T222/918, Dunkley, note to Mr Donovan, 30 December 1954.

Ibid.

National Academy of Public Administration, The Effects of Electronic Record Keeping on the Historical Record of the U.S. Government.

Unattributed, ‘Admissibility of Telephone Conversations.’

Cole, ‘Business Manuscripts: A Pressing Problem,’ p.45.

Young, Person to Person, pp.17–18.

Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, pp.20–21.

Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, p.166.

Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, p.167.

Committee on Departmental Records Report (HMSO: London, 1954), Cmd 9163.

Appraisal Project Board, ‘The National Archives Appraisal Policy Background Paper’, p.1.

Committee on Departmental Records Report, app.

Committee on Departmental Records Report, p.44.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Cox, ‘The Failure or Future of American Archival History,’ p.146.

This surfaces the fact that there remains in the archival world a strong focus on the written. Interestingly, this raises issues analogous to the keeping of oral history more widely. Evelyn Wareham has written about the erasure of cultures with oral histories from the record, because ‘no matter how widely we try to define our archival missions, archivists are primarily concerned with the maintenance and preservation of written records.’ Wareham highlighted problems with this narrow focus, quoting Doug Dalton in discussing how oral culture requires some form of embodiment to encapsulate the formation of memory, pointing out that the Pacific has a plethora of such embodiments such as a ‘carvings, buildings, monuments, flax panels, pottery, notched sticks, features of the landscape, and aspects of language itself.’ Here, the capture is by conversion to the material. See Wareham, ‘From Explorers to Evangelists,’ p.194, 196.

Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration, p.166.

Schrag, ‘The Working Papers of Federal Policymaking,’ pp.42–3.

Pascal Rigollet, ‘Retention of recordings of telephone calls’. Clare Cowling, ‘Retention of call recordings.’

Caswell, ‘Instant Documentation: Cell-Phone-Generated Records in the Archives.’

O'Toole, ‘Cortes's Notary: The Symbolic Power of Records.’

Harvey, So Where's the Black Hole in our Collective Memory?

Ibid.

See, for example, Black et al., The Early Information Society; quotation p.3.

Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.

Op. cit. p.xii.

Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet.

Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,’ p.134–5.

Rauber et al., ‘Ethical Issues in Web Archive Creation.’

Rauber et al., ‘Ethical Issues in Web Archive Creation.’

I am grateful to the peer reviewer for raising this point.

See Tourney, ‘Caging Virtual Antelopes.’

Jenkinson, ‘The Future of Archives in England.’

Ibid. It should be noted here that Jenkinson was not in favour of appraisal.

Jimerson, Archives Power, p.319.

Edgerton, The Shock of the Old, p.212.