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.
I like to think that archivists, despite our focus on the past, are typically a step ahead of the general culture because we always have to have the future in mind at the same time. That being the case, I feel we should already be thinking ahead of where initiatives like data.gov are and be considering how we can be more open in ways beyond content and access.
What I gleaned as one of the core argument from each piece is that the greatness of cinema is in the beauty of the image, the beauty of storytelling, and the creation of a dreamworld of sorts that we access through viewing and are able to keep segmented into its proper place as fantasy and not real life. The other half of this argument is that there isn’t really much evidence that people are compelled to imitate the acts they see on screen, which is one of the big arguments for ratings and censorship. There’s some nice paradoxical reasoning here: You can’t say that moving images dig into the mind and inspire people to do ill, but moving images dig into the mind and inspire people.
One person can be an inspiration and symbolize much that is beyond his or her original reach, but history is built by the millions. Hopefully that singular inspiration will also create a desire to dig deeper and discover more that history has to offer. Happy researching, and Happy MLK Day!
But this should not lead to a defeatist attitude; we should continue to take our higher responsibilities and standards seriously. This is why I say we do The Best Option at the Time, not Good Enough, because the ethics and standards of our field should not allow us to settle.
Because all archives deserve advocacy, your story deserves to be told.
Andy’s well deserved honor reminds us of the multi-faceted aspects of being an archivist.
Even the big dogs have to deal with the impossible seeming task of producing more while spending less…
What we can say is that, though the universe tends towards decay, the human mind tends to turn away from it and back towards unity.
We could perhaps, then, almost consider Tarantino the more austere Archivist as compared to Burns.
