Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations

In Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, Richard J. Cox argues that personal archives might be assuming a new importance in society. As the technical means for creating, maintaining, and using documents are improving and becoming more cost-effective, individuals and families are seeking to preserve their old documents, especially traditional paper forms, as a connection to a past that may seem to be in risk of being of being swallowed up in the immense digital gadgetry in our Internet Age. There is a reversal to other technologies as well, such as leather bound journals and fountain pens, by some individuals resisting or protesting the increasingly digital world they reside in. Behind these very different approaches are similar impulses, and, these divergent paths raise identical questions about the role and purpose of traditional archives dating back two centuries and more. Personal recordkeeping raises a remarkable array of issues and concerns about records and their preservation, public or collective memory, the mission of professional records managers and archivists, the nature of the role of the institutional archives, and the function of the individual citizen as their own archivist. Archivists need to develop a new partnership with the public, and the public needs to learn from the archivists the essentials of preserving documentary materials. We are on the cusp of seeing a new kind of archival future, and whether this is good or bad depends on how well archivists equip citizen archivists.

Cox, presumably a professional archivist in some capacity, does not join the vociferous lamentations that first camcorders and then digital cameras are making family records temporary, contingent on the technology of the day, and too cheap and abundant to take care with. Rather he examines the response of some individuals and families to this state of affairs, and what that response means for the archiving profession. There is in face a movement by families to be more conscientious about producing, collecting, and preserving traditional paper documents in more formal archives than before, precisely in reaction to the digitalization of the diurnal world. He suggests how professionals can help, and how they might change their techniques and procedures to get most use of the such archives in the future. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)