A Monument to Memory
Control of the archive – variously defined – means control of society and thus control of determining history’s winners and losers.1
Or, as Hollywood would have it:
While we must, and will, win this war, we must also remember the high price that’ll be paid if the very foundation of modern civilization is destroyed.
So opines George Clooney in the wonderfully melodramatic trailer for the hotly anticipated movie: The Monuments Men
http://youtu.be/izTbur3YYiY
Based on Robert M. Edsel’s book novel The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, this is the remarkable true story of six men, handpicked to rescue the art masterpieces of the world from Nazi thieves under direct orders from Hitler during World War II.
In total, there were 345 men and women from thirteen nations who joined the MFAA – Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives, of the Civil Affairs and Military Government Section of the Allied armies. Established in June 1943, members of the MFAA came from a variety of arts based backgrounds, art historians, curators, artists, architects and educators and went on to illustrious careers at America’s top Arts Institutions. Many spent up to six years in Europe during and post WWII protecting monuments, locating artworks, and in the years following the end of the war, handling the restitution of works of art and cultural works stolen by Hitler and the Nazis.
While it may be all too obvious why the recovery and restitution of paintings, sculptures, artifacts and documents stolen during WWII was so important to the Allies, it is worth stressing how vitally important having these works restored to their rightful owners and places is, in terms of serving to reconnect those people, torn apart by war on a scale never before experienced, to their cultural past. While Schwartz and Moore raise questions and concerns throughout their essay: Archives, Records, Power, in their conclusion there can be no doubting the importance of archives:
Memory, like history, is rooted in archives. Without archives, memory falters, knowledge of accomplishments fades, pride in a shared past dissipates. Archives counter these losses. Archives contain the evidence of what went before. This is particularly germane in the modern world…the archive remains as one foundation of historical understanding. Archives validate our experiences, our perceptions, our narratives, our stories. Archives are our memories. 2
The drive to collect, organize and conserve materials from the past seems an innately human one. As does the converse: the desire to destroy, limit access to, or hoard, in order to exert some sort of power or control over others is equally a uniquely human characteristic.
Marlene Manoff, in her essay Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines looks to the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, who, she states:
…claims that Freudian psychoanalysis offers us a theory of the archive premised on two conflicting forces. One is a death drive and the other is a conservation or archive drive that is linked to the pleasure principle. In this formulation, the archive affirms the past, present, and future; it preserves the records of the past and it embodies the promise of the present to the future.13 3
Manoff goes on to point out:
The stakes in this struggle can be very high. In 1992, during the war between Abkhazia and Georgia, four Georgian members of the National Guard threw incendiary grenades into the Abkhazian State Archives resulting in the destruction of much of the history of the entire region.17 According to Derrida’s formulation, such destruction represents the failure of the present in its responsibility to the future. Similar losses have recently occurred in Iraq. In the aftermath of the U.S. led “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Iraq’s National Museum, National Library, National Archives, and other repositories have been looted and burned. A chorus of voices has declared this a cultural disaster of immense proportion.4
One of those voices was journalist Adam Goodheart whose article in the New York Times Missing: A Vase, a Book, a Bird and 10,000 Years of History, Mannoff cites, was informed of the devastating significance of the Iraq’s cultural losses by John Malcolm Russell, Professor of Art History and Archeology at Massachusetts College of Art.
In his own, eloquent essay, Why Should We Care?, Russell explains how he found himself responding to western media with the cover-all response: “Because Iraq is the cradle of civilization” 5 when media asked why the world should care about the looting of the Iraq museum in April 2003. But for Russell and his Iraqi born colleagues on site, the significance of the loss went even deeper than the fact that artifacts had been stolen or destroyed. He describes one of his most profound experiences in the days immediately following the looting of the Iraq Museum was participating in an NPR recorded discussion via satellite phone with Ahmed Abdullah Faddam, professor of sculpture at Baghdad’s College of Fine Arts:
Professor Ahmed was very eloquent about what the losses at the museums and libraries meant for the future of the Iraqi people… But his most chilling comment transcended nationalism: “What can you do with a man who is ignorant and doesn’t have any culture? He is just like a dead man.”6
Russell goes on to comment:
He is also a very dangerous man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled with dross. Having a past, having a sense of who we are, allows us to measure our-selves against what political demagogues or market forces say we should be.7
In terms of an on-going commitment to protect the world’s cultural heritage in 2006 the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield was formed, and in September 2008, the U.S. finally ratified the 1954 Hague Convention (Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict), the cultural equivalent of the Red Cross. Between the USCBS and Clooney’s homage to the Monuments Men perhaps there is hope yet for the world’s memories!
1.Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook: Archives, Records, Power – Archival Science 2: 1–19, © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers
2.Ibid
3.Marlene Manoff: Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, 2004 portal: Libraries and the Academy 4(1): 9-25
4.Ibid
5.John Malcolm Russell,Why Should We Care? Art Journal, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 22-29.
6.Ibid
7.Ibid
Issues of Responsibility and Opportunity in Digital Archiving
Thinking a great deal lately about the concept of the archive and specifically digital archiving, I recently spent a morning in the Condé Nast Research Library and was interested to see how/where these issues might be at play. In conversation, the senior librarian informed me that the library operates separately from the archive and described the difference as such: the archive serves as the center for preservation while the library provides access to information. While this sounds like a simple and practical divide, the idea was further complicated when I asked about articles published only online. Who handles the preservation of these articles that must make up a huge contribution to the collection of these media brands? She smiled somewhat ruefully and said she wasn’t sure. Not only did the library have no involvement with this process but the librarian actually said she was too apprehensive to even ask questions. With only three librarians, and one other part-time staff member, she said they didn’t have the resources to tackle that issue if it was raised. I was interested in this division between the archive and library and asked some further questions about photo requests, receiving yet another vague response. The librarian informed me that they had “some photo records” and could respond to “some” requests leading me to believe that the divide between the two departments isn’t quite as strict as was originally portrayed. The interaction got me thinking about issues of responsibility in terms of digital archiving.
Condé Nast has digitized the entirety of Vogue from the very first issue, an expensive undertaking that was outsourced to a different company. Currently, a yearly subscription costs $3,250. Digitizing is expensive and time-consuming and corporations like Condé Nast must decide what paper materials to digitize while also considering how to incorporate born digital materials into their archive. As of now, it is quite unclear how that is being handled.
The archive as a physical collection and theoretical concept forms a basis for much of scholarly research and when examined brings up issues of authority, authenticity, ownership, and policy. Attempts to define these objects of study get at the very nature of the disciplines they serve. Associate head of the humanities library at MIT, Marlene Manoff names various concepts of the archive such as the “social archive, the raw archive, the imperial archive, the postcolonial archive, the popular archive, the ethnographic archive, the geographical archive, the liberal archive, archival reason, archival consciousness, archive cancer, and the poetics of the archive”—a list which speaks to the way this concept has permeated many fields (11). Derrida in his influential Archive Fever, claims that the archive produces as much as it records the event. “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (18). Within this context the structure of the archive also determines what can be archived, and history and memory are then shaped by the technical processes of “archivization”.
These technical processes have seen huge transformations with recent advances in information technology. Manoff claims that the methods for transmitting information shape the nature of the knowledge that can be produced, and points to social theorist Adrian Mackenzie’s claim that the centrality of the archive to cyberspace stems from the fact that existence in virtual culture is premised on a live connection. In Mackenzie’s phrasing, “to die is to be disconnected from access to the archives, not jacked-in or not in real time” (10). In this culture of connectedness, there is a new kind of instant archivization where the moment of production and preservation happen at once.
This situation leads to two potential opposing issues. On the one hand we are producing very vulnerable digital records at an alarming pace, however; if digital archiving efforts prove effective we could end up with a more complete historical record than ever before, an information overload.
Information consultant, Terry Kuny, commented on this situation fifteen years ago,
As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times.
Kuny places the responsibility for this future preservation work on librarians and archivists, and it seems that in terms of the opposing dilemma—information overload—these same professionals would take center stage. Manoff points out that archival work is “about making fine discriminations to identify what is significant from a mass of data. These kinds of distinctions are also central to the work of librarians and archivists” (Manoff 19). However issues of digital preservation have far-reaching implications relevant to almost every discipline, and one of the biggest issues currently facing digital archiving is a lack of a clear path or a defined sense of responsibility as I saw at Condé Nast.
In Scarcity and Abdundance: Preserving the Past in a Digital Era, Roy Rosenzweig points to an absence of process in digital archiving. “Over centuries, a complex (and imperfect) system for preserving the past has emerged. Digitization has unsettled that system of responsibility for preservation, and an alternate system has not emerged. In the meantime cultural and historical objects are being permanently lost” (745). He discusses historians’ lack of attention to these issues, in part due to an assumption that these are “technical” problems outside of the purview of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Manoff points out that, “archival discourse has also become a way to address some of the thorny issues of disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge production and the artificial character of disciplinary boundaries” (11). The most important and difficult issues of digital preservation are social, cultural, economic, political, and legal—issues humanists should excel at. Yet this professional division between historians and archivists leads to a confusion of responsibility that seems to go beyond solely this historian/archivist split. Within the discourse surrounding archives, libraries, museums and archives are often conflated and there is confusion not only concerning the overarching questions of how and what to save but also who will be doing it. Digital documents are disrupting our traditional system of publication, dissemination, and preservation. Digitization challenges our notion of ownership, who owns the materials and thus who is responsible for their preservation. Licensed and centrally controlled digital content erodes the library’s ability and responsibility to preserve the past. Why preserve something you do not own?
Rosenzweig ends his discussion, pointing to “one of the most vexing and interesting features of the digital era…the way it unsettles traditional arrangements and forces us to ask basic questions that have been there all along” (760). Digital preservation and the challenges it presents open up an opportunity to re-think disciplinary boundaries, to potentially form greater cross-disciplinary connections, and in doing so strengthen our own field. One thing is for certain, there isn’t time to wait for a perfect solution and if seen as an opportunity for joint action, this recreation of the processes of preservation can be an exciting opportunity. Let’s not avoid asking the questions that need to be asked.
Sources
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january00/01hodge.html#Kuny
Derrida, J. & Prenowitz, E. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25(2): 13
Manoff, Marlene. “Theories Of The Archive From Across The Disciplines.”portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9-25.
Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3)
Protected: Inspiration and Impetus: Emphasizing the Need for Digital Preservation
EDA: Connecting to a Past we Never Fully Knew
Almost everyone is familiar with the poet Emily Dickinson in some way. Dickinson is remembered to be a private poet and is well known for her short poems with themes of isolation. In her lifetime, only a dozen out of roughly eight-hundred of her poems were published. Since she led a life so private, most of her friendships are evident through correspondence.
Today launches the Emily Dickinson Archive, a large scale open-access digital archive containing all of the poets surviving manuscripts. This project was two years in the making, led by Harvard University Press in collaboration with Houghton Library, Amherst College, and the Boston Public Library. “It collects many surviving manuscripts of the slight, shy poet who once called herself — with considerable irony — “the Belle of Amherst.”(The Harvard Gazette).
So what might this 19th-century poet make of the decidedly immodest archive of her poems being released today, bringing to light in one digital place most of her surviving manuscripts?
The compilation of these digital documents sparked great controversy from a feud that has continued for generations. The collaboration between institutes sparked debates over ownership. It has been stated that the site is intended to “facilitate scholarship” and not “make the scholarship”. The two year project required overcoming jealousies in effort to create a “neutral online space for gathering manuscripts”. Some members of the scholarly community disagreed with such claims, stating “archives are not neutral spaces and the presentation of documents is to some degree interpretive”.
Such disagreements connect to the earlier reading of Questioning Library Neutrality, in which the social and political roles of libraries are discussed – the question of how the archive might impact public perception and support. The scholars disagreeing with the claim that EDA is a “neutral online space for gathering manuscripts” likely find contradiction in the assertion that there’s an absence of decided views, expression, or strong feeling.
With the evident controversies surrounding the institutions collaboration with such jealousies over ownership their is evidence that perhaps the debate is concerning the trading of cultural capital and in that “who controls the information, controls power over that society”. That society being the community of scholars interested in the knowledge organized on EDA. Controversies surrounding the archive exceed the topic of information literacy.
The conflicts surrounding the archive’s manuscripts, many of which some scholars consider nonessential, derives from the overarching goal to bring all of Dickinson’s work to light. The institutions collection of works strived to skip on of the age old archival practices; “Archival work is about making fine discriminations to identify what is significant from a mass of data”. Instead, EDA makes available any and all of the poets work, perhaps in effort for scholars to better understand the very private poet and her life of solitude. In that approach, it must have been conceivably easier for the process of archiving these works, documents, and manuscripts. It has been observed in the past, a universal philosophic problem in the “underpinnings of both library and archival collection and cataloging practices”. In many cases, the difficulties in archiving are rooted in the process of determining how and what to acquire, preserve, and catalog. It is possible that the EDA project portrays a newer approach to scholarly archives. In considering Marlene Manoff’s journal, Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines, and the section on Implications for Future Research, perhaps EDA falls under this archival discourse about the changes in knowledge-making practices. One argument from Manoff’s journal is that “open archives are a cornerstone of a free and informed society”.
“What if those manuscripts were the very ones Dickinson hesitated to publish in her own lifetime, or — in bursts of cheerful immodesty — delivered to friends with fresh gingerbread or a bouquet of flowers? What if that archive revealed, in every variant, all of her known poems? And what if it showed the world how her handwriting began to slope and sprawl as she got older, and that she sometimes wrote poems on old bills, paper bags, or the backs of envelopes?”
While we will never have those questions answered from the renowned poet herself, one can hope she might appreciate the role she has played in the modernization of archives. Emily Dickinson was a reclusive person and a poet that found inspiration from the confines of her home. Things have changed for Dickinson, while she was once isolated from the outside, her work’s now available to the world. The article released by the Harvard Gazette explains, “It’s that enduring drive to know Dickinson better that the EDA is trying to capture.” In Manoff’s journal, “despite their limitations, we cling to archival materials in the hope of somehow connecting to a past we can never fully know” (p. 17).
Sources:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/10/the-digital-dickinson/
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/10/23/harvard-amherst-dickinson-archives/#
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/books/enigmatic-dickinson-revealed-online.html?_r=1&
Dickinson, Emily. Final harvest: Emily Dickinson’s poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
Manoff, Marlene. “Theories Of The Archive From Across The Disciplines.”portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9-25.
Benjamin, the Record Collector, and Memory
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin outlined the ways in which the technologies of photography and (especially) film had transformed the production and culture of art. Mechanical reproduction of objects lead to the loss of the “aura” of unique objects, art became severed from its ritualized “cult” tradition, and film, with its astounding capacity for camera trickery, was creating a new mass audience of “absent-minded” critics. One area of mechanical reproduction noticeably absent from Benjamin’s discussion, however, is that of sound or musical recording.
Musical records (vinyl) were certainly prevalent in mass culture by the time Benjamin was writing in the 1930s. Like the mediums in discussion, records became an embodiment of what he called “the work of art designed for reproducibility.” He gives the example of the photographic negative, from which an unlimited number of prints could be made. For Benjamin, artistic production in this sense marks the loss of “authenticity” as an applicable criterion; as he says, it would make no sense to ask for the “authentic” print of a photograph. His conclusion is that this loss also signifies a total reversal of the function of art, where “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.” But to return to the record (and my focus of discussion, the record collector), the terms “authenticity” and “ritual” are striking. In the parlance of the music obsessed of the early 21st century, the reproducible form of the record is equated with “authenticity”, and its modes of use tied to something resembling “ritual.”
In 2013, music as it is commonly experienced by listeners often has no material substance, it is another file to be downloaded from the internet at the click of a button, to be uploaded to an iphone later. Images associated with songs or albums are tiny and inconsequential. And yet there remains a section of the population for whom vinyl (and to a lesser extent other physical forms like tape) remains the most pure and true embodiment of musical transmission.
The UK-based music journalist/blogger Matt Ingram, who wrote online under the Woebot moniker, is a great example of this record collector mentality, at least to a certain crowd. From 2003 to 2008, he blogged about his lifelong journey with music, starting from his time as a teenage postpunk fan, to discovering dance music like early house, UK hardcore, breakbeat jungle, garage, and later grime, while also exploring earlier musics like dub reggae, jazz, krautrock, early electronic music, 60s English folk, prog, and other genres along the way. In all of his blog posts, he would catalog and share his impressions of LPs from disparate genres, lovingly uploading album cover images and information, while also sharing personal recollections of finding albums. He also sought to create an alternate canon, a response to the general popular music taste-making where only certain names make it into the classic rock or hip-hop “Archive.” In 2005 he posted a list of what he considered to be the 100 greatest records ever, using a trite list convention borrowed from magazines to showcase music brilliant and sometimes overlooked, a list of unseen or forgotten music currents.
As a side note, after Ingram stopped blogging, all of the written online content (and a fantastic but short-lived online “TV” show) he had created disappeared from the internet, another casualty of digital resources not being preserved. Finally in January 2013, all of his writing as Woebot was organized as a huge digital archive available for download as an ebook called The Big Book of Woe.
For Ingram records, already material documents of musical expression, became re-inscribed with personal history. The “aura” that Benjamin bemoaned the loss of seemed to be re-instated, both through the process of “digging” to find records, ie the search for unique and rare items, but also through the personal significance these particular items gained (even if they were reproductions). Ingram, for example, swore that his copy of Manuel Goettsching’s 1984 release “E2-E4,” had magical properties other copies didn’t have. As a more practical example, Detroit producer/DJ Theo Parrish had claimed to have records that “smell like 1967,” again drawing a connection between a record’s material being and its historical substance. On his blog, Ingram never uploaded mp3s or streamed music, perhaps both a nod to respecting the rights of musicians to be paid for their work, but also not so subtly suggesting that the true or “authentic” way for enjoying music was to seek it out and have an experience. In the end, one came away with the sense that Woebot wasn’t exactly a music blog, but a blog about a lifetime of living with music.
Might Benjamin have argued against this “aura” of records? He warned against the idea that film actors have auras, saying this had been replaced by the machinery of Hollywood hype and glamour, exterior to movies themselves. But in the case of the type of record collector being discussed here, much of the music was made or found in relative obscurity, or at least by people far from the kind of obsession with celebrity associated with film. A better argument could be made that it is simply another symptom of late capitalism, perhaps a fetishization of the rare or obscure for commodity value. But this overlooks the role record collection can play in personal and collective experience, which is maybe where the role of the idea of the “ritual” comes in.
Theo Parrish (aforementioned producer and DJ) has argued tirelessly in interviews for the superiority of DJing with vinyl, saying that though someone could show up with a laptop or ipod with tens of thousands of songs on them, they are at a disadvantage to someone with a more limited selection of records, who knows those records intimately through amassing them over a period of years and getting to know their ins and outs. This might seem a minor point, but the power of musical connection and identification becomes clearer when he describes a life-changing experience as a 15 year old. He was out at a party to hear underground Chicago House music legend Lil Louis, who unexpectedly play Stevie Wonder’s “As” at the beginning of his set. “I didn’t expect to hear this on the soundsystem with 1000-2000 other black kids… and that experience from my youth just touched me directly…” It was a song Parrish could directly connect to childhood memories of listening to records with his mother; Lil Louis’s record selection tapped into the archive of memory that much of his audience shared. As Parrish says, “I didn’t understand what a party was about… and a party in a lot of senses at that point in Chicago was bridging the gap between where you knew safety was – home- to a communal experience. And this song did it.” Unlike the movie audiences of Benjamin’s movie house, absorbing what they saw on the screen into themselves, this type of group dynamic (created by an individual selecting records from a personal collection) created unrepeatable moments where the audience was both absorbed into the experience and absorbing it. People who were at events like this often ascribed a spiritual or religious quality to their experience, precisely that which Benjamin seemed to think had been lost.
Writing in 1936 as a German Jewish exile, Benjamin was amazingly prescient not just about the state of reproduction leading to the coming war, but to the culture of audience as critics we now live in. Anyone with access to a computer can write or share opinions, no matter how mindless. But hopefully looking through the lens of records and music obsession can show that art can serve as more than just a function of politics, and that archived or collected memories can create new meaningful experiences.
References
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” trans. Andy Blunden (UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 1998).
“Woebot’s ‘The 100 Greatest Records Ever,’” accessed October 23, 2014. http://rateyourmusic.com/list/funks/woebots_the_100_greatest_records_ever__complete_/
“Theo Parrish,” accessed October 24, 2014. http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/theo-parrish–3-cheers-for-the-d
Aspects of the Digital Challenge
What will people in the future think of us?
This is a question that every generation wonders about, but can never know the answer to. According to this commercial, our generation will be known for bright colors and loud, electric music. But the fact is, we can never know exactly what the past was like, and no one in the future will know exactly what life is like now.
Since the beginning of time, however, humans have tried to get around this truth by compulsively saving and leaving behind stories, objects, and/or photos, hoping to leave a legacy along with them. In fact, these records have become regarded as being of great importance. They are organized, called archives, and are seen as glimpses into the past.
Whether one views an archive as simply a storehouse, a true portrayal of past events, or an inherently biased set of records, the power archives have in current society is undeniable. Archives are seen and used as credible sources and “wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory and national identity.” [1. Footnote Schwartz, Joan M., Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002) 1-19. Print.]
Now we have arrived at a transitional point. Advances in information technology will begin to change what archives collect and, in turn, their role in society. Questions regarding who is responsible for preserving the past, whether we should be trying to save everything, and how we define historical evidence are all becoming increasingly important. As Roy Rosenzweig points out, “One of the most vexing and interesting features of the digital era is the way that it unsettles traditional arrangements and forces us to ask basic questions that have been there all along.” [2. Footnote Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3)]
Complicating this process is that there is currently no consensus among archivists as to how to handle digitization. The archival world will soon reach a tipping point: decisions will have to be made, and they will have a major affect on how archives are perceived and used in the future.
The Patricia D. Klingenstein Library at the New-York Historical Society, although not entirely pressured by the digital movement, is dealing with some of the challenges it brings.
A Special Collections library, it includes printed, manuscript and architectural collections. Although it has been digitizing since 1998, and has several collections freely available over the Internet, its incorporation of technology is an ongoing process. It is a process that directly affects the Library’s two main purposes: access and preservation.
As part of the Library’s move toward digitization, it has started using a program called Aeon, an online request system designed for Special Collections and archives. Specifically, it is used by Special Collections that don’t circulate. Patrons are registered into the system when they first visit the library and can then request items directly through an online catalog through a personalized account. This system allows the Library to monitor each request, keep track of what items are being used, prepare for events, and more easily manage transactions. Statistics kept by the program can also help with obtaining funding.
However, for every benefit that technology offers, ongoing issues remain. For instance, NYHS continues to maintain a large card catalog for manuscripts. Each card contains a rather extensive description of the archival material, regardless of the document’s length. Researchers can look through the cards, which have more detail than the online catalog, to find precisely the resources they need. The information and detail on these cards is fascinating, but the library hasn’t yet found a way to put them online. Ideas such as scanning each individual card or simply typing them up have been discussed, but time and expense are just two of the obstacles currently preventing such a venture. For now, the card catalog remains the only way to access this information.
Furthermore, NYHS is in a consortium with NYU and other libraries in New York City. This entails access to each institution’s collections via an online catalog and finding aids. NYU is also responsible for any IT work, programming, and formatting of the online database. This helps with consistency, but leads to other issues: for example, while NYHS has certain ideas and needs because they are Special Collections, NYU has a more general library and, thus, sometimes has conflicting desires for how technology should be used.
Another issue has to do with the cost of processing collections. NYHS, and the other libraries within the consortium, use a program called Archivists Tool Kit. Currently, though, there is a pressing debate over Archive Space, which will soon replace Tool Kit. There is a fee structure associated with Archive Space, which has many people in the Archive community up in arms. Tool Kit has no such fee and, as a result, some members within the consortium are resistant to the change.
Such additional expense is a major issue associated with technology. Programs are not static and when a collection is digitized, it isn’t a onetime cost. Often, IT people must be hired to help install, upgrade and troubleshoot these programs. In this sense, a fee structure with automated upgrades may actually be cost effective.
Continuous changes in technology directly affect archival processing and how archivists allocate their time. With each new program, there is need to reformat previously digitized collections. Because NYHS is within a consortium with NYU, when NYU chooses to switch, it will be imperative for NYHS to switch, as well, in order to keep their digital collections updated.
These day-to-day issues are all related to the elephant in the room: born-digital archives. Which of these materials should be archived? How will they be archived? NYHS hasn’t been directly affected by this issue yet, but it is something that is rapidly approaching and is in the back of their minds.
Dealing with born-digital archives leads to problems with storage, software, and preservation, and will eventually redefine the archival community. As technology continues rapidly to advance, things like floppy discs and VHS tapes become obsolete. Furthermore, unlike non-digital archives, like books, there is no way of knowing if a VHS tape is broken unless you can test it, for which a VHS player would be needed.
Raising these issues is merely scratching the surface, and there seems to be a sense of pessimism in the archival world as to how they will be dealt with. The smaller issues NYHS is currently dealing with prove the point that a consensus must be reached among archives and libraries before a solution is possible.
Otherwise, our generation will be known for having an abundance of technology, and for not knowing how to use it.
Trust in Digital Publications
“The digital audience wants different things,” and according to a recent article Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi Is the Future of E-Books on Wired.com, they want fiction. There has been a large push for fiction titles since e-books became popular. One explanation is that the anonymity of e-readers allows people to be more comfortable reading strange books on their commute [e.g., Fifty Shades of Grey (which was originally self-published)] or that fiction lends itself to episodic books that leave the reader wanting to see what happens next as soon as possible. [2. McMillan, G. (2013, June 26). “Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi is the Future of E-Books.” Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/digital-publishing-genre-fiction/all/1] But, maybe digital fiction is popular because it’s being contrasted against the unpopularity of digital non-fiction. Perhaps this is caused by the communal consensus that digital publications are not as trustworthy or authoritative as print.
Is something digital legitimate? It’s easier to copy and share, which is positive because it lowers the threshold to dispersing information. But, at the same time, anyone can post his or her thoughts online in a second, visible to anyone that’s willing to look. Who are these people? Is what they’re saying valid? Supported? We’ve lost the publisher’s role as gatekeeper. They used to be the largest determiner of what was worth printing and distributing. As Derrida put it in his book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression:
“Why detain you with these worn-out stories? Why this wasted time? Why archive this? Why these investments in paper, in ink, in character? Why mobilize so much space and so much work, so much typographic composition? Does this merit printing?” [3. Derrida, J. & Prenowitz, E. (1995). “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” Diacritics 25(2): 13]
The logic would follow that if the weight of the decision to publish something is lessened by not having to invest the time and money in printing, less time and thought would be spent determining what is worth printing. Though large firms still manage most e-book publishing, these firms are offering services for individual authors and likely aren’t vetting every title that goes through their system. [4. “Self Publishing Sees Triple Digit Growth Since 2007.” PublishersWeekly.com. (2012, October 24). http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/54482-self-publishing-sees-triple-digit-growth-since-2007.html] The risks of publishing digitally are lower and the returns on successes higher; this encourages publishers to not only take chances on new writers and ideas, but also to put books into the world with less thoughtfulness.
Maybe the fact that fiction has taken off in digital form is because we don’t have to trust it. The author’s opinion doesn’t have to be supported; there are no footnotes to link to or glossary of terms to reference; and it doesn’t matter if the publisher actually screened the book or not. All that matters is if the writing is engaging enough and the right subject matter for the reader’s taste.
Another subconscious concern that may be driving consumers to continue buying non-fiction in print is archiving. There is a importance to non-fiction information and a feeling that it is more likely to be needed in the future. Readers want to ensure that they have the book on their shelf to reference later on, and, on a larger scale, to ensure that future generations can connect to past thoughts and determinations contained within. As Roy Rosenweig said, “Digital documents – precisely because they are in a new medium—have disrupted long-evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation.” [5. Rosenzweig, R. (2003). “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” The American Historical Review 108(3): 743] Or, to put it more abruptly: “Digital Documents last forever—or five years, whichever comes first.” [6. Ibid. 740] Even in our own homes, we still want to ensure that factual information is kept around and we don’t fully trust digital media to do so. If your Kindle dies and all your fiction books are lost it is likely to be less upsetting than losing all of your non-fiction.
One possible upside of the ease of digital publishing is that it puts the power more into the hands of the readers. Not only do consumers push the publishers in certain directions based on their download statistics, but they can also share books that they like more easily. If a book is interesting or important enough to share you can send a link quickly and without too much effort. If you recommend a book to someone and they don’t like it, it wont be thrown out or kept on a shelf forever, a file is just deleted, so the information flow can be stopped just as easily.
Maybe this how it will be determined which published materials to archive in the digital sphere: whatever lasts. Whatever is handed from person to person, device to device, is reformatted with each upgrade. If it makes it through the social/collective hand-me-down for , say, ten years then it’s important enough to know in the future. Kind of a throw-it-out-and-see-what-sticks approach to archiving, similar to the approach the publishers seem to be taking with their distribution: “Digital publishing also allows books to go to market much more quickly than printed books, and offers publishers the benefit of both rapid consumer feedback and the ability to adapt to reader response.” [7. McMillan, G. (2013, June 26). “Why Big Publishers Think Genre Fiction Like Sci-Fi is the Future of E-Books.” Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/digital-publishing-genre-fiction/all/1]
But if that’s the case, that power is still limited to those that can access digital collections, which is likely causing a further increase in the economic gap of knowledge. If you don’t have an e-reader or an internet connection, you aren’t able to consume or share digital-only materials and your voice isn’t a part of the conversation. “When something is rare or limited to a select number of individuals, such as an educational degree or cultural artifact, it has effective symbolic capital and provides the holder with a degree of symbolic power.” [8. Leckie, G.J., Given, L.M. & Buschman, J.E. eds. (2010). Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from across the Disciplines. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Libraries Unlimited] So if the power of deciding what to publish moves more away from the publishers, it’s still moving to only a subsection of society, the section that can afford digital readers. Even though libraries now offer e-books to check out, very few of them also check out e-readers.
The popularity of digital publishing is increasing rapidly and encourages traditional publishers and self-publishers to try new things and allows them to receive consumer feedback faster, but readers don’t seem as eager to consume non-fiction text digitally and are favoring the fiction genres in digital form. Over time, as iPads and tablets become the norm, and more textbooks are distributed digitally, it’s safe to assume that non-fiction digital sales will increase. Digital writing will become more trustworthy and authentic as it becomes more normalized . It will be interesting to see how long it takes for non-fiction digital sales to catch up.
Protected: Preserving the Past in Spite of the Present
Archival traces and ephemeral events
Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression” expands the notion of what can be considered an archive, and assigns more power to the act of archiving. For him, the process of archiving an event leaves a trace on an exterior substrate. A mark is made on a substance; memory is made tangible. This leaving of a trace is called the “repetition” of the event. As he notes,
There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. [1. Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (July 1, 1995): 14, doi:10.2307/465144.]
This repetition is by nature removed from the original event. The archive possesses a quality Derrida terms “spectral”: “…neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met…” [2. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 54.]
Yet at the same time it’s spectral, the way an event is repeated/archived is deeply linked to our understanding of that event. For Derrida, the archived form of the event ends up becoming an integral, inseparable part of it:
…the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. [3. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 17.]
The act of or potential for archiving ends up influencing the event itself. But what about events that resist archiving, like certain kinds of performances?
Recently, the National Gallery of Art in Washington presented an exhibition on Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, and as part of their web content they produced a video on the history of the dance company. Included were a mix of photographs of the original dancers, photographs of restored costumes, and videos of later recreations of several of the dances. Some of the earlier restagings were done by the Monaco-based branch of the Ballets Russes formed shortly after Diaghilev’s death, whereas others were staged by companies like the Joffrey Ballet in the 80s.
Traditional archival records (like photographs, costumes, and drawings) were probably used to construct these restagings, but the videos of the restagings themselves can also be considered part of “The Archive” of the Ballets Russes: in the absence of a video trace produced of the first performance of a dance, these videos become the most tangible trace of the whole performance.
But should these archives of the Ballets Russes become part of the Ballets Russes? Though any kind of change of medium of reproduction (like the photographing of a painting) can be understood to enact changes on the “event”, reproductions of performances seem to be especially spectral and those changes can be jarring. In the realm of performance art, an awareness of the changes that occur when an original performance is repeated led some artists beginning in the 1970s, like Vito Acconci, to prefer not to reperform pieces—to keep out archival accumulation. Maybe the “death drive” is a concern, reperformance in a way superimposing or causing the forgetting of the original piece. As Derrida says,
If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition… [4. Derrida and Prenowitz, “Archive Fever,” 51.]
This has come up in the context of the performance work of Marina Abramovic—for example in 2005 when she reperformed some of her own works as well as the works of others (including Acconci). On the other end of the spectrum there are artists like Tino Seghal, an artist who vigorously prohibits any kind of archiving of his work. No photographs and very little writing about his pieces is permitted: in the catalog of the exhibition documenta (13) held in Kassel in 2012, the page describing his work was completely missing, and his name only appeared in the table of contents and index.
In some cases the resistance to archiving is a conceptual aspect of the work, but even when it’s not it can be said that in general the ephemeral nature of dance performances and performance art makes them difficult to archive. Part of this must simply stem from the fact that a performance is temporal, and doesn’t necessarily become fixed into a tangible medium: it doesn’t easily leave a trace.
Online media and websites can also be understood this way, even though a website seems fairly tangible at first glance, and for a while even looks the same upon repeated viewings. But like a performance, websites are dynamic. In his essay, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era”, Roy Rosenzweig points out that although it feels like we are drowning in digital documents, websites actually change or disappear rapidly. In an article on web archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Heather Slania also brings up this point, noting that it is difficult to capture websites built in Flash and sites that link to databases, “…meaning that the only documentation left might be a website’s mere existence.” [5. Slania, Heather. “Online Art Ephemera: Web Archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 32, no. 1 (March 1, 2013): 118. doi:10.1086/669993.]
To illustrate this point, Slania includes an image of a flash website captured in a crawl done with Archive-It, which appears as a gray box. Of course, the image captured in that crawl is an archival trace, but as Slania says, it only testifies to the existence of the website. How useful is that kind of trace? In this case probably not terribly, but it brings up the point that just as the process of archiving shapes the event itself, so does the character of the archive (what kinds of traces are left) shape the kinds of questions researchers ask.
A recent effort to restore Douglas Davis’ “The World’s First Collaborative Sentence”, an early example of Internet art, could provide a model for archiving web-based materials. Even though it was created less than 20 years ago, the site was already in need of restoration, which was undertaken by the Whitney in summer 2013. Problems like “link rot” (when hyperlinks no longer function since the site linked to has disappeared) arose, as did the question of whether to alter the code so that it functioned in modern browsers. Ultimately the team decided to present multiple versions of the site: a live version that works in modern browsers, the original site (with its broken code), and screenshots of what it looked like in Netscape (an old browser). The live version satisfies researchers who want to understand the interactive aspects of the original site, while the presence of the untouched original site, along with the residual broken hyperlinks left in the live version of the site, are a testament to the fragility of web structures—and to the challenges of archiving dynamic ephemera.