This work is about the challenges that archivists and other “record” collecting curators – manuscript and local history librarians and museum curators – face in coping with the vast documentation that was created during the late twentieth century. Ensuring the preservation of the “Memory of the World” is often a heavy burden for archivists but it is not one that they require to carry out alone and it is one that they can start in their own locality. The role of archives and archivists in national history and culture and in community and personal identity has just been amplified in the National Council on Archives advocacy document Changing the Future of Our Past (2002). The appearance of a paperback edition of Richard J. Cox’s 1996 work is therefore timely as it deals with the issue of archival documentation strategy within localities, which can be rural or urban, large or small.
Although the case studies and model relates to the USA, it is a methodology that can be adopted within the UK and Europe and the issues that Cox discusses of competing collecting repositories working together to ensure “adequate documentation” of a locality – city or region – finds resonance in the cross sector co‐operation of the UK today. Joint library, archive and museum agreement on a documentation strategy will produce a plan of action agreed by all to ensure the preservation of records that will provide a balanced memory of all activity of significance within a locality. It is impossible for one collecting body to preserve and document all the materials being created within a locality. Selection for preservation is necessary and the appraisal of records for preservation is a main area within this work.
Documenting Localities forms part of a series produced by Cox on the nature of archival theory and practice in the USA and is a companion volume to Managing Institutional Archives (1992). It is one of Cox’s main premises that great efforts should be made to encourage institutions to establish their own archive provisions and that institutional archives then take their place within the local plan of action to ensure the preservation of records documenting the locality. Collecting repositories should be repositories of last resort. Institutions should maintain their own archives.
Cox, in this work, discusses the primary methods archivists have used to document localities, the practicalities of archival documentation strategies as a means to a more systematic approach to archival appraisal and provides a schema for conducting documentation work. Although the work is heavily US‐based, the theory on which it is based deserves to be understood and interpreted to the UK scene in the new environment in which cultural heritage and information professionals find themselves working post Re:source.
Richard J. Cox is one of the leading archival theorists in the USA and is Professor in Archival Studies at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburg.
