Because Thoth Said So
"One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.
- from the notebooks of Mr. Ibis" – Neil Gaiman, American Gods
I will be perfectly honest – what interested me most about the archive visit was not the process of archival or even the contents archived (though waving around George Szell’s conducting baton while intoning Wingardium Leviosa! was tremendous fun), but rather the philosophy behind the archivist’s job: What gets saved? Why save anything? How does one catalogue what one has saved? What’s the purpose of the archive?
I’ll deal mostly with the last, because it really is the driving force behind all the others. The archivist is motivated by two somewhat exclusionary goals: to preserve the integrity of the archive’s contents for as long as possible, and to aid deserving persons in their research. The clash, in this case, stems from the second law of thermodynamics: that great bogeyman, entropy. The only way to preserve the archive unto the ages is to keep it far away from destructive forces, like bright light, oxygen, and above all people. Of course, to do so is to defeat the second purpose, for an archive that goes unread is of use to nobody at all. The successful fulfillment of the archivist’s role is, as Mr. Ibis puts it, a balancing act.
The archival job is, however, rapidly changing. Once the materials’ descriptions are uploaded to a computer system, the researcher’s job of cross-referencing becomes a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Advances in scanning technology, automated handwriting interpretation, and cheap memory mean that, within a century at most, there will be no documents that will not be able to be preserved forever with perfect accuracy. This, of course, will bring with it a whole host of accompanying dilemmas: an enterprising hacker will be able to change the past if he is willing to do the work. But for now, with any scans stored as images rather than interpreted text, modification is much harder to do, as is an automated search of those documents. Researchers continue to rely on abstracts that archivists draw up after a cursory perusal of the document. But the sheer weight of the data that is being continuously generated is staggering. Increasing reliance on email as a mode of intra-office communication means that workers are suddenly creating many times the paper trail they once were. Archivists today need to perform a sort of triage, as it were – what stays and what goes? What is worth saving? Will future generations have a burning desire to know the details of the fourteenth annual coffee party?
I believe firmly that the increasing reliance on computers is a net positive. I am a staunch supporter of open access to information, something that many historical archives are simply unable to grant because of the physical implications of such an idealistic action. Should they do so, they would presently find that they no longer have an archive, but a mass of disintegrating tree innards. Being able to quickly and automatically preserve documents allows resolution of the archivist’s conflicting goals, describing the tale of our past as well as humanly possible.
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