This is a collection of seven essays loosely around the theme of the relationship of theory and practice as the title suggests. It is introduced by the editor Caroline Brown, one of the architects of the University of Dundee's postgraduate course on archives and records management, which has hosted a series of conferences in which theory has featured largely. Her contribution is a thoughtful reflection in which she justifies the collection in that old virtue of “improvement”, “making us better at what we do” (p. xxviii). This is worthwhile ambition when confronted with a “boxwallah” mentality.
The next three chapters which deal with concepts, appraisal and description are by Caroline Williams, Anne Gilliland and Jennifer Meehan, all well known in the field in the UK and the USA. They are in their way peculiarly dated as they do not address directly the way in which the digital environment, that can no longer be described, as emerging, is changing the parameters of record keeping and archival science. Many of the niceties of the debates about what is a “record” have been overturned and even concepts of provenance have become problematic. We know anecdotally that office practice has changed fundamentally and that, for example, the email thread has replaced the minute or the formal exchange of correspondence. These changes, about which we need to know much more, must have consequences for appraisal, as EDRMS let alone SharePoint in no way replicate the ordered filing systems of the paper world. Inevitably more will be kept, but how much? Archivists can no longer parade with certainty that they only keep five percent of the output. The notion that description somehow reflects intellectual control, as Meehan avers, seems touchingly dated when search engine technology, which we all use to find stuff, does not work like that. Although not surprisingly metadata is referred to repeatedly, there is no reference to information retrieval techniques or Google. This is disappointing as IR uses many techniques and concepts that are all too familiar to archives and records, such as structure and more besides, many of which are borrowed from the corpus linguistics community. Simply to discuss what is happening in the digital world as the “wild frontier” (p. 232 quoting McDonald) overlooks the fact that this is where we all like to be with Google at our elbow.
The next chapter by Jeannette Bastian, a noted US archival educator, repeats many of the shibboleths which characterise much of what is wrong with the two professions. She gives the impression that archivists and records managers live in their own private world unaffected by the governance structures of the organisations which employ them. This cannot be true. The management of archives and records is essentially about the management of risk as they embed contingent liability and can be discovered in legal processes. There are obvious differences between the public and private sector, but even in the public sector there are sensitivities that demand long periods of closure, for example to protect the names of informers in theatres of war or to comply with international conventions or treaty obligations.
The shortcomings of these four earlier essays are more than made up for by two excellent contributions. The first from Eric Ketelaar on memories and identity in which he explores the subject from different perspectives, of the individual, the group and the institution, drawing with customary skill on a wealth of literature from outside the domain. He concludes in a memorable sentence (p. 144) that: “The archive is a living archive only when it is appropriated by a particular user or a community for a certain purpose” and is in a sense “neutral”. This is a development of his long held assertion, which I share, that an archive is always in a state of “becoming” and is never fixed as there are always new things to be discovered by asking different questions. This is followed by a magnificent tour d'horizon by Rachel Hardiman of the relationship of philosophy to what she terms ARK. Hers is no post-modern diatribe of the sort that is all too familiar in archival literature, but a wide ranging discussion of the various strands in what is in effect contemporary philosophical thought and its use in and relationship to archival and record keeping thought. You long for more and wish she would turn her hand to a bigger canvas that embraced the information sciences much more widely. Every student of the discipline should be encouraged, if not made, to read these two chapters.
The last chapter by Alan Bell, which attempts to explore the relationship of theory to technological change, fails to build on Rachel's foundations. She introduces a number of philosophers, who have a good deal to say about technology, not least Heidegger and Benjamin, but they do not rate a mention. It is as if the great intellectual battle about the ontology and epistemology of the internet and the deeply contested debate about “agency” of technology had left archives and records management by. This is certainly not true of information sciences where Latour's actor network theory has been widely adopted. This raises serious questions in my mind about the future of the twin disciplines, which at times seems to be wilfully myopic and unwilling to engage with a wider discourse. It may explain why information science and information handling is being appropriated by other disciplines, such as anthropology, ethnography and philosophers, who are breathing new life into it and often draw on ideas that date back to antiquity.
