The 21st Century Archivist
by Marielle Gage, Certified Archivist
Some issues are perineal to archivists in every time and place– the ravages of time, water, insects, or fire on our records; the willful theft or destruction of our records for profit or to avoid accountability; funding and manpower gaps that lead to massive backlogs in processing or reference work. We have, over the centuries, developed best practices that offer some degree of relief against these pressures – we have a much better understanding of the ideal temperatures and humidity percentages for documents, as well as modern security and pest control, and some archivists have done heroic work protecting their records from those who would harm them or reconstructing what was attempted to be destroyed (see Abdel Kader Haidara, the “Bad-Ass Librarian of Timbuktu” and the Stasi Archives reconstruction efforts for examples). But in the 21st century, as the digital age generates information and increases access demands to levels never before considered, new issues have come to the fore. A full examination of all the new considerations would take a monograph or twelve, so for brevity I shall limit myself to two: the demands of fast-paced and ever-expanding digital-born information development and creation, and the legacy of colonial practices in archival centers.
The Digital Age and Data Explosion
In 2016, Paul DiMaggio called the 21st century “the age of data – big, plentiful, and full of threat and promise.” The growth exponential – between 1956 and 2015, computer power increased one trillion-fold. Information access is also growing like never before – in 2024, more than 320,000,000 Americans have access to the internet. Contrast that with the number of Americans who ever had a landline, which reached a high of 192,510,000 in 2000. And even at their height, daily newspapers in the US numbered their circulation in the tens, not hundreds, of millions. Global data creation is expected to reach 180 zettabytes next year, almost a three times increase over the 64.2 existing in 2020 (for context, a zettabyte is one billion terabytes, and the newest models of iPhone can store up to one TB each).
While much of this data is fluff or temporary records, the number of permanent records is still staggering. One repository, the Library of Congress, already holds more than 21 petabytes (21,000 TB) of digital materials. It has more unique digital files than print.
And digital materials come with new challenges. The sheer size, of course, is an issue – surveying or processing multi-terabyte collections can be a nightmare, if not received with far more organization than the average person (or even archivist) keeps their hard drive. So, too, are there new complications with maintaining access to these files. Unlike a traditional analog record such as a book, which can be read with the naked eye so long as the page remains intact and the language is understood by the reader, digital files must contend with hardware and software obsolescence and interoperability.
8-inch, 5,25-inch, and 3,5-inch floppy disks
Digital formats have changed wildly over the last few decades. Many earlier file formats, which were standard in their day, cannot be read by modern operating systems. Even if the file is internally intact, free from corruption and bit rot, it can be inaccessible to the researcher either because the file format is orphaned or has been supplanted by another format, such as WordPerfect for Microsoft Word. Old hardware can also present a challenge, such as obsolete external storage formats such as floppy disks, who require readers no longer in mass production. Every year, more and more discontinued formats become increasingly inaccessible – when is the last time you saw a Betacam player for sale, or even a VCR? All this increases the risk that information on these formats could be lost unless active preservation steps are taken, such as transferring the material to a new format. That costs time, and costs money.
Privacy Concerns and Ethics
The era of big data also provides another concern for modern archivists – the incidental capture of non-donor materials that might have privacy concerns. This can be as simple as a responding email being included in an inbox download, but the most pressing example may be social media-based collections – if a web archivist crawls a particular hashtag, for example, they are likely to capture the posts of small-time content creators with only family and friends as followers, who also very well might be minors. These authors might be completely unaware that the crawl is even happening, much less that their content is being captured and preserved. The permanent storage of these posts in research collections could allow them to reach a far wider audience than the author ever intended, and resurface years or, in theory, decades later, long after the subject may have changed their minds about whatever the controversy de jour was when they published the post. While web archives can be used to hold public persons responsible for hateful or inaccurate statements even after their press teams hit “delete,” the chance of private individuals “going viral” for past postings concerns most web archivists, especially as developing stories can change rapidly between breaking news and final version, and social mores and individual opinions can grow and change over time.
Beyond the technical challenges of the era of big data, archives and archivists are increasingly confronting outstanding ethical challenges in our profession – namely, addressing the historical role of archives as the records centers of the powerful and established, which traditionally has led to the exclusion of minority voices and the sequestration of native records by colonial institutions.
This can be felt in a myriad of ways, all of which frustrate the modern archivist and archival researcher. One perhaps lower-stakes example is the John F. Kennedy presidential Library’s Condolence Mail collection: in the days and weeks after his assassination, his widow Jacqueline Kennedy received over 1.5 million letters from across the world. The next year, she announced every single letter would be preserved within the new Library. However, in the 1980’s the collection was sampled and reduced to 1/10th its original size. According to the Library’s Stacey Chandler, the focus was on preserving VIP and international letters, as well as those “judged to be ‘good’ or ‘well-composed’” which, going by the standards of the day, undoubtedly meant those written by well-educated persons writing in “standard” American English, without considering regional or class dialects, or those with disabilities. The collection as it stands, therefore, is missing some of the voices for whom Kennedy’s death meant the most.
This sort of omission, either by lack of collect or selective retaining, has been repeated a thousand times over in institutions across the globe. And though modern archivists desperately wish we could, we cannot recover what was never saved. All we can do is learn from the mistakes of the past and create better processes going forward to prevent such circumstances from happening again.
Another legacy issue archivists are trying to confront is the colonial origins of many archival repositories. As the Early Caribbean Digital Archive puts it:
Archives are repositories of knowledge. But all repositories are created and maintained by individuals located in time, place, and history, who make choices about what counts as knowledge, what belongs in a particular archive, and why it belongs there.
Colonial archives, for example, were often directed towards economic and political control of the colony – charting expected labor outputs and tracking suspected dissidents, for example. Furthermore, they often gathered records about or by the native populations into centrally controlled repositories that limited use or access to the “powers that be.”
But since the 1983 Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives, and Debts, archivists around the world have been making efforts to decolonialize their holdings and reconnect their records with the peoples concerned.
This was taken during the course of an investigation by the Art Crime Team of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014. It depicts a portion of the private collection of Don C. Miller of Indiana. Miller’s collection contained approximately 42,000 cultural artifacts from several continents, of which 7,000 were seized by the FBI. Miller’s collection focused on Native American artifacts and contained over 2,000 human bones that were looted from burial sites.
One example is the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Reconciliation Framework, which seeks to integrate the “perspectives, knowledge, and methodologies” (pg. 6) of First Nations in archival description and management. Above all, the goal is to acknowledge that First Nations have “intellectual sovereignty over archival materials created by or about them” (pg. 8). While doubtless any reader can find one point or other that they disagree with one way or the other, this archivist for one thinks it is a step in the right direction to center respect and communication with historically disenfranchised peoples and declare their rights to their own records, though whether that is by digitization or other means of increased access, or outright repatriation, is left for the individual institution to determine. The problem wasn’t created overnight, and nor will it be solved such, but so long as good-faith efforts remain more than lip service, this archivist believes progress will continue to be made.
In all, the archivist of the 21st century has more on their minds than their 19th or early 20th century predecessors, and sometimes the issues can feel overwhelming. Certainly, there are no simple answers or easy fixes. But that’s part of the challenge, part of the fun. In its most basic essence, archival theory and practice is dedicated to the transmission of the historical record to others, present and future. Improving upon that, increasing the audience and accuracy of the collections, can never be anything but worthwhile.
Do you need help digitizing your archives? Would your collection benefit from the expertise of one of our Certified Archivists? Reach out to us today and we’d be happy to help!
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