{"id":1111,"date":"2014-10-23T15:49:44","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T15:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/listheory.prattsils.org\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2014-10-23T15:49:44","modified_gmt":"2014-10-23T15:49:44","slug":"aiming-for-neutrality-in-collections-and-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/2014\/10\/23\/aiming-for-neutrality-in-collections-and-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Aiming for Neutrality in Collections and Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the article “Archives, Records, and Power: the Making of Modern Memory”<\/a>, authors Shwartz and Cook explore the impact archivists have over power relationships, identity formation, and social memory through the\u00a0acquisitions and preservations\u00a0that take place in collections and archives. \u00a0The origin of archival use is\u00a0important to understanding the framework\u00a0of archives. Schwartz and Cook touch on the history of the archive saying, “Their origins lie in the information needs and social values of the rulers, governments, businesses, associations, and individuals who establish and maintain them.” \u00a0The authors go on to say this dynamic has been in place as far back as the Greek empire, and centers on power, specifically the power to shape history through what is preserved and what is omitted from a collection.<\/p>\n

Though archives, and the people who work therein, are often positioned as neutral, they are very much a reflection of the needs and views of its founders. This\u00a0is not a commonly-held or\u00a0discussed reality\u00a0of the field, at least to the common layperson. \u00a0Truth be told, up until reading these articles I had not questioned this widely accepted ideal of the archivist as being\u00a0objective and without personal bias. \u00a0No matter how high ones\u00a0professional standards are, it is nearly impossible to expect complete neutrality in a\u00a0person – each of us\u00a0has a background and experiences that form our views of society and our values, and\u00a0it is extremely difficult to set these aside, or to know how our subconscious factors in.<\/p>\n

Sometimes these biases are more evident, like which items are\u00a0deemed worthy for inclusion in\u00a0an archive, \u00a0and sometimes they are more subtle – \u00a0such as the way items are labeled and organized in\u00a0collections. \u00a0In terms of\u00a0the latter there are various\u00a0factors at play that may hinder\u00a0neutrality. \u00a0On a broad scale, the systems which are often used – Library of Congress Classification System and Dewey Decimal System – are shaped by Western philosophy and Christianity. \u00a0Holly Tomren points out in her paper “Classification, Bias, and American Indian Materials”\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0“the Dewey Decimal System is a top-down classification system … one need look no further than the 200 main class “Religion” to see that it is a biased system, where Christianity occupies numbers 220-289, and “other religions”\u00a0are relegated to 299.” \u00a0Further, there are terms used in classification headings that are greatly biased, and, in some cases, culturally insensitive. \u00a0In Tomren’s paper she lists examples of these, one of which included “LIBRARY SERVICES TO THE SOCIALLY HANDICAPPED”, a result found when a Latina patron was searching for Latino access to library services. \u00a0Indeed, the manner in which organizational systems are designed can greatly\u00a0reinforce the way groups of people, often minority groups, are portrayed in society. \u00a0As Hope Olson said in [1. Olson, H.1998. Mapping Beyond Dewey’s Boundaries: Constructing Classification Systems for Marginalized Knowledge Domains. Library Trends,\u00a0<\/em>47, (2)] from her 1998 article,\u00a0“The problem of bias in classification can be linked to the nature of classification as a social construct. It reflects the same biases as the culture that creates it.”<\/p>\n

Item selection and inclusion have a high impact on archives, \u00a0as Shwartz and Cook note, “Control of the archive..means control of society and thus control of determining history’s winners and losers. Verne Harris … has shown starkly how this has operated under the apartheid regime in South Africa and its captive national archives, and how this naturalized power may be different under post-apartheid conditions.” \u00a0 Harris has a very specific\u00a0vantage point\u00a0on\u00a0archives. \u00a0In his article “The Archival Sliver:Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa”<\/a> he sees\u00a0archives functioning more as a “sliver” of social memory, not a fully encompassing, accurate reflection of periods of history. \u00a0While he does acknowledge the experience he had during that time in history was particularly extreme – including the government destroying public records to hide their wrong doings during the apartheid – he goes on to say, “I would argue that in any circumstances…the documentary record provides just a sliver of a window into the event. Even if archivists in a particular country were to preserve every\u00a0record generated throughout the land, they would still have only a sliver\u00a0of a window into that country\u2019s experience.” \u00a0He continues that the record\u00a0is: “…substantially reduced through deliberate and inadvertent\u00a0destruction by records creators and managers, leaving a sliver of a sliver from\u00a0which archivists select what they will preserve. And they do not preserve much.” \u00a0Harris’ take on this directly challenges the notion that archives are neutral spheres that purely reflect the reality of particular time periods. \u00a0It also shows that\u00a0lack of neutrality in an archive can be on an individual level (the personal biases an archivist has), or on an institutional level (such as what records are\u00a0being provided to archives by their creators, and what is\u00a0being withheld or destroyed). \u00a0This is not to imply that archivists are purposefully engaging in deceitful activity, but to touch on the fact\u00a0that archivists are human, and as such they operate within their particular, complex societies (and in which socially accepted norms and government agenda factor in) as well as their individual subconscious, which may lend itself to inconsistency in archival practices from one archivist to the next. \u00a0While this complicates the notion\u00a0of neutrality of archives, just as importantly it touches on the fact\u00a0that the way information\u00a0is organized has\u00a0the ability to constrain what can be viewed or accessed by the public. \u00a0Regardless of the intention, pieces\u00a0that are left out of\u00a0a collection, either purposefully or lost, can have a direct impact on the social memory of a country.<\/p>\n

To be aware that\u00a0archives are a part of \u00a0social construct, and that biases exist in archivists, is a strong step in moving forward toward a more balanced\u00a0approach\u00a0to archives. \u00a0It is important to recognize\u00a0the limitations individuals and institutions have in presenting information,\u00a0whether it be in context of classification systems, or attempting\u00a0to\u00a0fully encompass the reality of a period of history or a person. \u00a0In an assessment of\u00a0archives and reality, Harris points out, ” if archival records reflect reality….They act through many conduits \u2013 the people who created them,\u00a0the functionaries who managed them, the archivists who selected them for\u00a0preservation and make them available for use, and the researchers who use\u00a0them in constructing accounts of the past. Far from enjoying an exteriority in\u00a0relation to the record, all these conduits participate in the complex processes\u00a0through which the record feeds into social memory.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the article “Archives, Records, and Power: the Making of Modern Memory”, authors Shwartz and Cook explore the impact archivists have over power relationships, identity formation, and social memory through the\u00a0acquisitions and preservations\u00a0that take place in collections and archives. \u00a0The origin of archival use is\u00a0important to understanding the framework\u00a0of archives. Schwartz and Cook touch on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/foundations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}