Archives Against the World
Vint Cerf, the vice president of Google, recently spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose, California. Most of his remarks were devoted to the fragile nature of digital information and the peril that fragility poses to the historical record: he warned of “bit rot” and “a forgotten generation, even a forgotten century.” The main problem: most digital data is inextricable from the hardware and/or software needed to access it. The necessary tapes, programs, disks, hard drives, platforms, operating systems, etc., are mostly obsolete, so vast amounts of data from the last forty years or more remain trapped inside aging, degrading physical media, perhaps never to escape. Several news outlets shaded Cerf’s remarks with the tone of a dire prophecy from one who has seen our dark future and come to warn us of its immanent arrival.
This was all deeply annoying to archivists, most of whom have been with the problem of digital obsolescence -- cleaning up the mess left behind by people just like Vint Cerf -- every day for the past twenty years (at least). Cerf’s warning comes late for those of us who have stacks of unlabeled 5 ¼” floppy disks from the 1980s sitting in boxes in our vaults, their contents a total mystery. In addition, as Luciana Duranti pointed out on the Archives and Archivists listserv, Cerf was selling something: “digital vellum,” a way of storing information via cloud computing that would bundle together the digital data with the information needed to access that data, ensuring that future systems would always have what they needed to keep the data available. Coincidentally, would this be a service that Google might provide? Friends, are you tired of dealing with the heartbreak of bit rot? Is your data outdated? Your hardware gone soft? Now there’s Google Vellum, the new product that everyone’s talking about! Your data will stay fresh for years...
You can see why archivists met Cerf’s remarks with a collective shrug. But what no one reacted to was the very last thing (according to the news reports) that Cerf mentioned during his talk. “To do this properly,” he said, “the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing.” Cerf is talking about “digital rights management,” or DRM. I want to discuss DRM and its long-term implications for archives, but I don’t want to call it DRM because the phrase “digital rights management” is a maddening euphemism. The producers of digital consumer goods exercise varying amounts of control (but always some control) over the goods they produce after those goods have been purchased; this leads necessarily to exercising control over the behavior of the consumers themselves. That’s what DRM actually means. It represents the linguistic shift away from “consumers” towards “users,” away from “goods” towards “apps” and “services,” away from the notion that those who purchase products have any meaningful claim of ownership over those products and towards the legal reality of “content” temporarily “licensed” to an “end-user.” “DRM” is also misleading because it contains the word “digital.” DRM can be applied to analog objects that interact with digital devices, the way Green Mountain Coffee applied DRM technology to its Keruig coffee pods and brewing machines to prevent other companies -- and more significantly, its own customers -- from creating their own pods for Keurig machines.
To make the issues at stake clearer, I’m going to swap the phrase “digital rights management” for “consumer control” -- ConCon for short. ConCon has been embraced by every corporation in the world as the way of the future. The governments of the world have followed their lead. The WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996 requires participating nations to enact legislation making it illegal for consumers to even attempt to circumvent ConCon. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act was the U.S.’s version of that legislation. It’s easy to see why ConCon is the dominant paradigm for corporations selling digital products or offering digital services. Those companies are essentially information brokers, whether that information takes the form of movies, music, books, games, polling data, traffic patterns, news reports, housing prices, or dating profiles. In order to protect their revenue streams, these companies have to protect their particular information and the wrapper it comes in from being copied and distributed for free. That’s why, despite the fact that consumers universally loathe ConCon, it’s only going to get more common. Almost universal. But as strange as that world is going to be to live in, I’m more concerned about the implications of that ConCon-saturated world for the future of archives.
This is the part where I will sound paranoid to some of you. Sorry, but here goes: I believe ConCon will eventually pose an existential threat to archival institutions as we now understand them. Not digital preservation. Consumer control measures. Long-term digital preservation is essentially a technical problem, no matter how complicated and difficult the solution. There are excellent tools being developed at this moment to help solve the digital preservation problem. ConCon measures are not just a technical problem, they are a legal problem, with the full force of private property and governmental interests devoted to preventing that problem from being solved. Not only are information brokers totally uninformed about and uninterested in the (relatively) open access to information archives offer; they’re openly hostile to it, as that access represents a potential threat to their profits. As more and more digital information is encased in proprietary formats with ever-more restrictive use licenses, that access -- which archives depend to deliver useful information to their patrons -- will dwindle away.
Maybe some technology companies will offer archives to purchase licenses to access specific types of proprietary digital files and/or media. That would make any archive that purchased such a license yet another revenue stream for that company, with obvious ethical, legal, and financial complications following. Perhaps other tech companies will decide to cut out the archival middle man and offer their own services for migrating old data into new formats, as with Google’s digital vellum, for the price of either financial compensation, some form of ownership/rights over the data, or both.
Or maybe archivists will decide to do what the owners of those Keurig machines did: figure out ways to get around the ConCon restrictions. Archivists could simply hack their digital media to disable or circumvent ConCon. This would obviously put them on the wrong side of their institutions’ administrators and any legal counsel they might have. Even hacking non-commercially available software and hardware for preservation purposes puts archivists in a legal gray zone at best. In our ConCon future, it’ll be impossible to present most digital information without either legally and financially acquiescing to ConCon or illegally defying it.
But what would defying ConCon institutionally look like? Would those archives be quasi-legal institutions, or even outright outlaws, based on free and open access to digital primary sources? Will the archives of the future -- not the “licensed” archives, but the archives with information that patrons actually want to use, the archives with actual original documents -- for all intents and purposes end up looking something like a better-curated Wikileaks, with finding aids?
I argued in my first blog post that archives are, by their very nature, subversive institutions. I think ConCon will eventually force each archivist to decide for him or herself he or she wants embrace the subversive aspect of archives’ cultural imperative. That, in turn, will change the face of the field of archives as a whole.
But who knows? Nobody can predict the future. I might be wrong.
I might be.
T
Personal Papers, Private Mythologies
Diary of Joseph Jenkins. (c) Brian Jenkins. Original at State Library of Victoria, Canada.
September 1938:
One of the individuals whose papers we collect is the great avant-garde film-maker and all-around genius Maya Deren. Among those papers is a short diary, written in the form of letters addressed to herself as “Dear A.E.”, as in “Alter Ego.” At the time these letters were written, Deren was 21 years old and attending Smith College, from which she would earn a Master’s Degree in literature. She had recently divorced her husband, whom she had married at the age of 18. She begins the first diary entry/letter this way (all punctuation and capitalization is hers):
“Dear A.E. (Alter-Ego):
Because I cannot think clearly unless I am trying to express something; because I am not positive unless I am trying to convert; because I cannot express unless I feel I am expressing to someone; because this promises to be a year of loneliness and because I must train myself to be able to be alone and yet be something...thinking, expressing, hoping, convincing, analyzing...in short...a live human being...so I dedicate these letters to you. I will try to tell you what I fear so that I shall know myself; I will try to tell you what I want so that I shall know myself; I will try to tell you what I plan so that I will plan….I will try to tell you so that all these impressions, all these nostalgias, all these vague and troubling desires, all these fears will become real in my mind and so becoming specific and actual...I will be able to deal with them better.”
1620-1660:
It’s not surprising that the diaries of the New England Puritans contain daily, ongoing confessions to God of their sins, whether actually committed or only desired. But a Puritan’s diary was also a workshop of self-reflection, where the members of God's select few constructed theological connections between the incidents of their everyday lives and the will of God brought to bear on a fallen Earth. But “everyday life” for the New England Puritans took place in a world saturated with holy significance. In their diaries, various events were often recounted multiple times in attempts to place the occurrences within a sacred framework -- to understand how every stillbirth, every massacre, every act of witchcraft fit the overall narrative: one’s continuous movement towards the wonderul, terrible presence of God’s grace. Does that sound delusional? As if they were "out of touch with reality"? But look carefully across the gulf of almost five hundred years: the only difference is that the particular New England Puritan way of seeing the world has faded away into a dead mythology. The New England Puritan corpus has thus passed into the hands of archivists like me, and we carefully inspect, clean, organize, and catalog each fragment, so that historians and other researchers can better analyze and criticize the remains. But again, the only difference between us and the Puritans are those hundreds of years, giving us the perspective to clearly map (where they could not, as still inside them) the contours of their lives and beliefs. A diarist today still considers her writings fiercely private; she still writes to try and understand the events of her existence, to reflect on her thoughts and reactions, to infuse her life with more meaning, her own personal mythology, even as the actual substance of that meaning is always shifting. There has been one huge change: thoughts that we would normally keep private in our diary entries can, and usually are, broadcast online to everyone who subscribes to our social media feeds . Now that we live in the Network Age, it’s possible to keep a diary and have a mythology that’s personal but not private, embodied in posts, tweets, and status updates. Maybe private and public diaries alike are both what sociolinguistics call a “speech act,” specifically an “illocutionary act,” where the speaker uses language not just to communicate information but to enact a change in the current state of reality (“I hereby sentence you…” “I accept the nomination…” “I resign the Presidency…”). In that case, the point of any given diary entry, even one made public, isn’t really the actual content of the entry, it’s the act of creation, the building and modifying of the now-shareable personal mythology, and now we can even incorporate others’ responses (if any) into our own narrative, a convergence of private myths in a shared astral-electronic plane.
2005:
A Researcher working in our John Clellon Holmes collection made an exciting discovery: a diary of a previously unknown trip Holmes made to Mexico as a teenager. Holmes was one of the founding Beats; he coined the phrase “Beat Generation,” was close with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; and his novel Go is one of the first Beat writings. As part of his collection, he had decades’ worth of letters, diary entries, and other documents, carefully arranged by date; so Holmes seemed to take documenting his own life and work seriously. The Mexico diary -- which according to the researcher consisted mostly of “sexual braggadocio” -- might have been significant to the development of Beat literature, as it would have predated Kerouac writing about a similar trip in part four of On the Road. But a couple days later, the Researcher asked me to come over to her table. She was exhaustively familiar with the details of Holmes’ life by this point, as she was trying to write his biography. The Mexico trip, she said, never happened. It couldn’t have happened. Holmes was, without a doubt, not in Mexico when all the events documented in the diary would have occurred. It was fiction written in the style of a personal diary. But this “diary” was never developed into a story or novel; most likely, no one except Holmes had ever read it. Was he the only intended audience? If not, who was it written for, and why?
2015:
At the repository where I work, most of the collections are based around individuals (as opposed to organizations, publications, or other corporate entities, though we have those too); and a good deal of those collections’ content consists of what archivists call “personal papers.” Unlike the records of an institution, personal papers always include non-“professional” items, quotidian objects that everyone accumulates in the course of mere living: diaries, journals, photo albums, letters, postcards, souvenirs, children’s drawings, maybe a pocketwatch, some clothing, family Bibles, mementos and ephemera. One of our collections includes two bullets taken from the dead body of a soldier killed in World War I, faithfully kept by his grieving mother. Archival institutions in general are built around institutions and want nothing at all to do with personal papers. Archives that are manuscript repositories, however -- institutions like mine -- often collect and preserve personal papers alongside all our other varied holdings. The only issue we have is the basic one: categorization. Archives often use standardized categories to describe their material the way, say, libraries do. But applying a set of standard bibliographic categories to a bound volume is one thing. That sort of cataloging has a long history, with many traditions and best practices. Cataloging personal papers is not so simple. Any given letter might touch on numerous different subjects; so what is it “about”? A diary might include observations about the weather, important appointments, pressed flowers, quotes from other writers, or all or none of those. Cataloging always conceals as much as it reveals, especially with personal papers. It’s no wonder the entries for personal papers in many archival finding aids looks like this: “Box X. Series Y: Personal Papers, [Begin Date] - [End Date].” This presents a problem for the many students and historians who, since the 1950s, have been trying to do (in the words of E.P. Thompson) “history from below.” These kinds of “non-records” are exactly what they are looking for, but because they’re difficult to describe, they’re difficult to find. One recent attempt at a solution has been for archives to digitize as much of this kind of hidden material as possible so it’s easier to access remotely. But that doesn’t solve the description problem... in fact, it often makes it worse. “Digitizing personal papers” usually means disaggregating material that has been grouped together physically (for whatever reason) into numerous discrete digital objects that each need a base level of decent-quality descriptive metadata in order to be discoverable by online search and browse functions. The main barrier between users and personal papers isn’t limited access, it’s the limits of our descriptive and cataloging language.
August 2000:
The material from The Writer arrived, as usual, in a plain cardboard box. It was my job to open all the incoming boxes, rummage through the contents, create a short accession record, and then figure out how I and my student assistants were going to rehouse and describe the new material. I had started this job less than two weeks ago, but I recognized most of the contents as “personal papers”: letters to friends, family photographs, tax returns, old magazines, maps, postcards. The Writer’s box had all these things. Then the objects turned strange: an empty prescription bottle from a pet clinic, for dog tranquilizers; a tiny envelope full of some sort of dried, crumbled foliage I couldn’t identify; a single stone of rose quartz; a pocket New Testament, its margins brimming with pencilled marginalia; a button-down shirt, maybe intended as packing material; a copy of the I Ching dated 1959. At the bottom of the box were various notebooks and journals; they were good quality, with firm bindings and heavy paper stock. I opened one and started to flip through it, looking for a date, title, signature, anything identifying. The Writer had filled almost every millimeter of space on every ruled page with black-inked, blocky-lettered words. I turned more pages. The only holes in these walls of black text appeared where The Writer had cut and pasted pictures on the leaves of the journal -- yogis, gymnasts, adults with their heads replaced with the faces of crying babies, images of Orthodox Christian icons, mothers and children. Most of these were taken from newspapers and magazines; some were photograph prints that had been trimmed, cut, written on. Without realizing it I began to read the text. The Writer struggled against various people out to exhaust her physically and drain her spirit; I realized after a few pages that these were her second husband and her stepchildren. Her tone switched from rage to rapture when she expounded at length on how the physical body could achieve real immortality. All we truly need to survive, she wrote, is exposure to enough sunlight and a supply of truly clean air; if only she could make others understand. The thoughts became impossible to follow, the phrases scrambled, the language like an alien English. The words kept going and going, and I began to feel the space around my desk shrinking. I felt physically encased inside The Writer’s brain, sealed inside a lightless, windowless box. But I kept reading. I lost track of time until something interrupted me, and I snapped the book shut, at the same time recognizing that I had started to crouch in my chair and cross my legs like I was curling up into a ball. I put the journal back in its box, and wondered if she was crazy, and if I had briefly brushed against that madness; but then I considered all the thoughts buzzing in my own brain on a daily basis -- if anyone stepped inside my head for just a moment they might think I was insane, too.
2015:
So the inadequacy of cataloging makes curating personal papers especially challenging. What makes the task even more interesting is that personal papers are heavily curated by whatever person created or accumulated the papers in the first place (and often by family members too). Whatever that individual decided to discard is permanently deleted from the historical record, and whatever they saved is now considered to have “lasting value” if the archivist also decides to save it. It’s similar to the process of self-curation that goes on inside every person every day: what to show, what to hide, what to say, when to keep silent. Your personal papers are the result of hundreds of small decisions concerning what to include and what to omit from the evidence of your existence. It’s the archivist’s job to try and maintain the outcome of those decisions... but along the way, odd things can happen. A persona of the collectee usually emerges, created from whatever is available -- various biographical sources, oral histories, a public image, and of course the contents of their personal papers. But a persona is a fragile thing even when it’s being actively maintained by someone. Personal papers have the paradoxical effect of simultaneously working to support and subvert a collectee’s curated persona. To frustrated historians and researchers using a collectee’s personal papers, the intentional absences and omissions can start to look suspicious, manipulative, even cowardly, despite any concrete evidence to the contrary. The collectee, through their careful grooming of their papers, has achieved almost the opposite of what they intended through their fastidious work; and I’ve seen researchers decide that they had to pore carefully over every document to find something “interesting,” i.e. a hint of life behind the dead-faced mask presented by the papers. Again, as with diaries, social media platforms have changed this process, but not very much. Individuals still curate their personas as much as ever, though digital personas, it turns out, are harder to groom as records tend to persist almost forever online (if you know where to look). The problem for archivists: social media companies have zero interest in repositories that wish to capture and preserve these digital personae. Some companies have data that is just not structured in such a way to fit with current archiving practices. When the Library of Congress approached Twitter in 2010 about archiving its data output to that point (beginning from its start in 2006), they ended up with 170 billion messages with no good way to search them. Twitter wants you to be constantly refreshing your feed, not going back and reading old messages from years ago. An extreme version is Snapchat, where the images, once sent, are supposed to self-destruct after a short time elapses. And then there’s Facebook, which is actively hostile to anyone to tries to capture information on its pages. It’s all their data, after all, and they don’t want anyone else scraping it together, aggregating it, and/or selling it -- that messes with their entire business model. Some archives, like the Smithsonian, have worked with Facebook to archive the sites of their own institutions and employees. But it’s safe to assume that these social media systems will make their information more proprietary, not less, as time goes on. It will be hard to explain to a researcher someday why a diary from 500 years ago is readily available, but a publicly-available web site from 2010 will be unavailable for another hundred years. It’s yet another paradox: the more our private myths are made public on line, the harder it is to preserve those narratives and stories for the future, to create the next generation of personal papers, and the next after that.
September 1938:
Maya Deren begins her final letter to “A.E.” by saying that it will be short, as she has already written a long letter to her father (a prominent psychiatrist) and a man named Don. Much of the letter describes her attempts to form friendships with the other women at Smith, despite her sense that they disapprove of her; “there is wall between us,” she writes, “which I cannot break down.” She closes her letter with these words:
“And here is an idea for a poem to be called ‘Study in Geometry’. That if you are seven feet away from a person that person is always seven feet away from you. Nearness must be mutual. It is true that you can face the person and concern yourself with him but nearness itself is the distance between you. Each person is a center and his relationship to other[s] the orbit of a circle and the person and the end of his radius has a circle of his own.
Now to write Don,
Good night,”
Archives as a Subversive Art; or, Start as you Mean to Go On
(c) Paramount Pictures, 1981.
Greetings and welcome to Imaginary Histories! I'm glad you're here. This is a blog mainly about archives and archival matters. To many of you reading, that probably sounds like a narrow, dull parameter for a blog, but believe me (and archivists already know this) -- archives are plugged into so many cultural, technological, legal, and ethical issues it's hard to know what not to talk about. That the archives field exists within such a permeable membrane is one of the things I love about it. I suspect that you, also, whoever you are, love the intersectional character of archives, even though it complicates our professional identity. Being an archivist means constantly having to re-explain what archives are -- to those outside the field, those within it, even to oneself... but that's what makes it fun.
I'm going to be honest with you: I've never blogged before. Starting a blog is a bold move -- in 1999; now it's like throwing a bucket of water into the sea, hoping that someone not only manages to swim through your personal H2O but also has some opinion on it that they wish to share. So why do it? Mainly: I'm teaching the Introduction to Archival Methods and Services class again next semester at the Simmons College School of Library and Information Science, and I want to integrate this blog into my class; I wasn't seeing other archival writings online (blogs, tweets, presentations, papers, etc.) addressing some things that I wanted to talk about; I turned 40 years old this year, and mortality is -- no surprise, I guess -- an excellent motivator.
This post isn't going to be as long as other posts to come, but I'm at least going to introduce some of the themes that will run through this blog. I'm particularly fascinated by the complex relationship between archival records -- and archives as institutions -- with "memory," understood as historical narratives broadly accepted as fact/history within a specific society and culture. Archival records are often used by those in power to reinforce the selected, "preferred" historical narratives. But the actual meaning of any given archival record is "underdetermined," i.e. open to various interpretations and ripe for placement in various contexts and frameworks of meaning (the archive itself is one such context). I suggest to you that archival records tend to radically undermine consistent historical narratives, and indeed that is part of what give the records "enduring value." Hence the title of this post (with apologies to the late Amos Vogel), "Archives as a Subversive Art" -- archives as nests of slippery objects that manage to wriggle out from under all attempts to completely capture their meaning.
But if that's true, it presents a paradox. Most archival records are institutional records, created to reflect the activities of an organization and its members, retained in order to retain some degree of corporate memory. How could they be subversive of anything? Well, that's part of what the blog is going to be about. There are many other paradoxes embedded in archival theory and practice, and I want to tease out as many as possible. Part of that teasing is going to be scrutinizing the content of archival/historical "meaning" (as used above) and its relation to what becomes "fact" and "history."
But in addition to all the above, I plan on discussing a lot of practical problems and solutions grounded in actual archival work, including issues around archival software, digitization, web design, processing, preservation, donor agreements, and so on. I definitely won't just talk about theory. On the other hand, I will talk about theory sometimes, so you've been warned.
About the Timeline of Archival History on this site: I couldn't find anything like it online, so I figured I would make it myself. Right now it's going to be a work in progress for as long as I can imagine, so please feel free to suggest additions. My goal is to build it into something useful for students and non-archivists who want to get a useful outline of the major events, trends, and individuals in the field.
Finally -- and in advance -- have a good Hanukkah, Christmas, Solstice, Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, and any other holiday to celebrate the fact that we made it through yet another year (more or less). Nice work! Let's try to do it again next year...
P.S. I have a weird thing for song titles (and titles in general) so I plan to use them in the titles of my blog posts, unless that gets too annoying. But I'll link to the song referred to in each post. Here's the first one. Sorry for the creepy image. Happy holidays... and pleasant dreams.