Archivists pitch “Archives”

Thank god for Boing Boing, which amazingly has provided exceptional coverage of all matters cultural heritage. Last week they reposted a message from Rick Prelinger’s blog about the decision by Society of American Archivists to NOT save the archive of its listservs dating back to 1993. An archivist responded to the post noting that it is common practice in the archival community to dispose of “routine correspondence.” (and I did dispose of lots of “routine correspondence” while processing collections in my archival days…)

Having recently spent a lot of time conducting research on the history of museum computing, I would love to have access to this sort of routine correspondence from my community of interest. Hell, I’m still pissed that MCN operated a listserv for years that didn’t even have an archive of messages (which we corrected upon moving to Mailman). John, if you’re listening, I’ll also be happy to personally take the archives of Museum-L off your hands if you decide it needs to be deleted!

However I argue that the listserv of any professional community is more than “routine” correspondence. Within those messages are the history of how a community has developed and changed. What are the major arguments the community went through? What were the issue of the day? Who was talking about them – who was responding? While within a larger corporate archives, or even within my own personal archive of e-mails I can see the value of pruning to eliminate duplication, or developing a strategy to eliminate irrelevant messages. This kind of appraisal usually requires a fair amount of labor. Is the cost of that labor even close to equal to the cost of storage (the SAA Council suggests it lacks sufficient “evidential or informational value”)? Probably not. Are there appropriate places and times to expunge routine correspondence – you bet. Is the Archivists listserv that place. No.

Rick mentions that the Internet Archive has some information from the publicly available archives – but just think of all the other parts of the “hidden web” that have been missed.

What is even more frustrating is that the message Rick posted was dated March 13, only a matter of weeks before the archive will cease to exist. SAA, I’m disappointed.

Off to a meeting, so I’ll have to leave these thoughts unfinished.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized, archives, cultural heritage, history, preservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.