When the world ends next December, all of our blathering and fretting over the best way to preserve archival materials will prove to have been in vain. In spite of it all, we trundle ahead with our work like the Sisyphean hero. Normally, I imagine the hill decades or centuries long; if asked my opinion about a new movie or album or current event, I say ask me again in 50 years. But, considering the circumstances, the normal timeline needs accelerating. Thus, the 2011 Archives Year in Review.

This seemed to be the point at which some dawning realizations gelled, at which a nagging thought in the back of my head became a lens projecting truth onto the screen of my mind. Archive is a word that should be archived. Archive is a word that is dead.

Integration and collaboration between departments is an essential component of organizational success today -– sharing resources, eliminating redundancy, and open communication help prevent the waste and lack of innovation that can doom an organization to irrelevancy and worse. However, the people who should be in control of setting policies for file management and for selection and implementation of asset management tools — the archivists and records managers out there — have ceded too much ground to a pure IT mindset.

Do we know what we are preserving, and are we making the right choices? Have we developed good practices for working with the private sector? Do we have adequate funding models for sustainable digital preservation? Do we know how to best valorize our collections in today’s evolving landscape?

When I was living in the Czech Republic a friend told me a story about installing cabinets in her apartment. The details escape me now (please don’t be disappointed) — I just remember that it was a long and difficult process. One thing did stick with me, however. When the project was complete, she and her boyfriend sat on the couch, admiring the new cabinets, and said, “To je Amerika” (or more closely, „To je America”). Loosely translated: That’s America.

The historical record preserved in archives informs us of What-Was, but, of equal importance, it reminds us that What-Is Wasn’t-Always.

Personally I wouldn’t really want to rely on that scratched up copy of The Gods Must Be Crazy IV: Crazy in Hong Kong or a variable quality, cut-up YouTube version of Teen Witch as the sole formats to maintain my cultural heritage.

Last week marked the anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and three others. I’m a fan of Buddy Holly’s music, but I’m not a fan of the nostalgia induced stagnation of people and historical events. As the memory of that period continues to fade away, our mental definition of someone like Buddy [...]

There was discussion of power and control; of going to these cthonic, isolated, fragile locations full of uncomfortable furniture and curt staff; of these inhuman institutions that define and defend what is considered culturally significant knowledge and can act as oppressors to unapproved subcultures.

We’ve all been aware of the tightening of budgets and funding resources due to the economic downturn, but these situations with the Tully papers and Billy Name’s works have me thinking that there are other kinds of threats to archival collections that will be rippling out for some time from the various financial troubles.