[Dialogue] Values for the Archives

Tue May 19 01:34:40 EDT 2009

Bill

A response from someone who has been involved in archiving:

1) Working in Adelaide to get the archives from the Sydney House into categories and boxes for the National Library.  Katrin Ogilvy and the Telfords headed up the team, which included visits from interstate colleagues.  

2) Foldering my own collection of O:E/EI/ICA archives going back to 1968, in my own papers, and to 1967, in documents handed to me by others.  Some of these will end up in (1).

A now-deceased former head of Home Missions in the Methodist Church (now part of the Uniting Church in Australia) slowly passed a document to me, with the comment "Perhaps you might like to have this?"  It was a  transcript of talks from the Mathews/Hilliard trip to Australia in 1967.  I had to restrain from being too enthusaistic and grabbing them!  And the talks had all the fire of a MLK speech!

It's that fire that I appreciate when I re-read parts of my archives (some people call it a "hoard").  It's inspirational - in the theological sense of the word, even if the times have changed.

3) Ordering a lot of scattered material on student governance in Australia, particularly South Australia.  No-one has written an historical overview of this work, except for my short (!) paper From Prefects to SRCs - a Thirty-Year Personal Journey from a few years back.  There's a lot of stuff "out there", and often it gets thrown out as "useless".  But when chatting with students about what has changed since 1970, they are surprised how far things have come.

I appreciate your categories, your emphasis on a filing/numbering system, and your emphasis on digitzing as you go.  I like the accessibility emphasis, so that people may re-order their own copy, for their own purposes, without destroying the original filing/numbering system. 

Best wishes for the May 29-31 gathering.  I'll be thinking of you as I tutor two students in Year 12 Physics and Mathematics.  I'll also be assisting patrons at the AFL football match between the Adelaide Crows (they're not doing well so far) and Hawthorn (reigning premiers) - "and the big men fly".

Cheers

Frank Bremner

From: bparker175 at cox.net
To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net; OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net; springboard-request at wedgeblade.net
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 22:43:36 -0500
Subject: [Dialogue] Values for the Archives

Greetings to the People of the Order,

I want to initiate a conversation before the Archive Meeting at the end of this month. The conversation is about some Principles concerning the Archives. Let us consider the notion of values. What are our values as we relate to the Archives. It seems there are three primary values: 1) Preservation; 2) Accessibility; 3) Flexibility, basically in that order. Why these three values? These are the ones needed to avoid unintentional and unnecessary damage to the Archives, to have maximum search and retrievable capabilities into any subject of interest in the Archives, and to have the reflexibility for anyone to access the Archives without being capable of changing the original configuration, which would be the physical location of each page. Why these three values?

1) Preservation: Preventing each page from rapid deterioration and not accelerating the decomposure rate. We need to be cautious. Plus, that rate grows the older the paper is. If the last page included was in 1988, it would be 21 years old and the oldest could be 50 years old. If people touch any page with their hand, that grease accelerates dramatically the deterioration, not to mention the physical bends and tears naturally occurring when people handle  files. This idea of any "hands-on" work with the Archives needs to be re-considered. We cannot afford to go through all the files and pages within the files because we will be destroying, not preserving the archives. Those pages are finite, but we don't need to speed up the process of destruction. What this means is that the file folders and the pages within, from this point on, need to be touched only one more time and they need to be to digitize at that time. After that, the original files need to be permanently put away, as is, with the best archival techniques of preservation.

2) Accessibility: This is the value from which we will be serving all of the people of the world and especially those people who care, and who have, or are, putting their life on the line to live out that care. Accessibility needs to be open and Anybody, Anywhere, Anytime can access and organize the Archives in any way they see fit for whatever reason.  They could create an entirely new archive based upon the way they had organized the Archives and download it to their computer. 

If we do this the files will never have to be moved, except into an environment designed for archives. Yet, the achievement would be total accessibility, flexibility, and total care for the Archives. It would also provide the possibility for hundreds of people simultaneously to be engaged in organizing the files into whatever subject categories they may find in the files they are assigned to organized. This process would create new configurations of the Archives, but only from a data standpoint; only from “sorting” subject data from the Archive database. By contrast, if the Archives are organized first, then they can be accessible only manually and only on location. It could take years, as it already has, before they are digitally available to anyone who is not in the basement of Kemper or to whatever floor they will be taken.

3) Flexibility: The Archives can have maximum flexibility when there is no danger of them being distroyed, changed, or reconfigured by the people who can access them. The original archive will always remain as they are in the present: file cabinet, drawer, folder, page, and image.  But, they will not be able to invade  the Archives, nor arrange, configure, or delete anything within them. In other words, no random person could change the configuration of the Archives. And by contrast, any person could organize, configure, or define subject categories and with authorization an entirely new Archive Index could be created and posted parallel to the original Archive. The Archives need to be digitized first in the order they are in currently. Once they are captured they can be organized into an infinite number of configurations.

There maybe many secondary values to be considered. Chronology: a Date Index for each Archive page. Original Source: the coded location of each page. This would allow anyone to see the history of the Order year by year; for example, and it would show the human journey of a corporate community of people year by year, who came together to create and live out of a response to what was happening in the 20th Century.

This may not be the way people are thinking about the Archives, but during the past 10 years I see how this is done every day in my work in an archival system running throughout this country involving billions of pages in books where no page is necessarily related to any of the other pages in the book. This is the public record of land. Now they are organized so that you can find any document of record (a Deed, for example) in any county in the United States. These archives are located in each County Court House and there are only three indices: 1) Reception Index, the date the document was recorded; 2) the Grantor/Grantee Index, the party who sold and the party who bought; 3) the Tract Index: specific tract of land found in tract, section, township and range in which the land lies. We could delve into the processes and methods for doing this, but for the immediate purpose of starting the conversation, the details of processes and methods for doing this are not included here.

Careful thought is needed to work on those indices. In principal, an index should be something that cuts across every folder in all the file cabinets. Not many indices are required. One index can be enough, two better, three if there is a good reason. Any more indexes need to be considered only on the basis of necessity. If the history of every tract of land in the United States can be found in all of the three Indexes then it seems the Index of the Archives would be a way to access all of the Archives.

This approach gets the Archives started, not in the final form, but in a form required so that all the other steps can be taken to get to the "organized archives". This would be the Primary Index and there may be other Seconday Indices two, would be required in order to access the desired images. The most obvious Index is a code for the precise current physical location of each page. That would require something like: The number of the image, File Cabinet number; Drawer letter; Folder Title/Subject; and the Page number. So, for example, each page of each folder in each drawer in each file cabinet would be coded as Image No. 00125, File Cabinet No.34, Drawer B, File Folder Title:Summer '69, Page 56. The code therefore would be 00125.34B.S69 .56. This is the equivalent to the Tract Index. Another Index might be Chronology: the date of each document. This would be equivalent to the Reception Index.  The value here is that an Index needs to cut across every file in the Archives. This would allow a hundred people, as an illustration, to be assigned, say a Drawer each from a file cabinet. They would organize the contents digitally, then each Drawer would be brought together with the other Drawers from the same File Cabinet and be organized as a complete File Cabinet. This organization would reveal what the "Subject Categories" are in each File Cabinet, and finally those same people could comb through those organized files and pull all of the content concerning a specific Subject Category.

If the primary value is Preservation then we should touch the folders and pages only one more time and that is to digitize them and put them back exactly where they are now or move them to a contolled environment designed for preserving archives. It is understandable to be concerned about how could we ever retreive anything if they are dumped into a data warehouse without being organized into subject categories. I don't disagree with that, only the order of the process and order employed. Preservation first, Accessability,second, and  Flexibility third. 

I hope this gets the conversation underway but however we move forward we need to consider this approach. I regret that I will miss the meeting,  but it couldn't be helped.

Everyone, take care of yourselves, and there is a very good reason to do so.

Grace and Peace,

Bill Parker

----- Original Message -----  

From: Sandra/Bob True 
To: Colleagues ; OE-bounces at wedgeblade.net ; springboard-request at wedgeblade.net 
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 3:45 PM
Subject: [Dialogue] special invitation

Subject: [ustoptrainers] special invitation

Save the Date

You are invited to attend the 2009 ICA-USA Board Meeting and Strategic Thinking Retreat

May 29-31, 2009

Friday, May 29                       evening                                    Welcome reception

Saturday, May 30                   morning                                   Focused Conversation
-          ICA’s purpose: past, 
    present and future

                                                afternoon                                 Purpose and mission 
                                                                                                statement  workshop

Sunday, May 31                      morning                                   Strategic Directions 
                                                                                                workshop 

                                                afternoon                                 Song, Story, Symbol 
                                                                                                workshop

                                                Meeting adjourns at 2:00 pm

You are also invited to attend the three day Archives Project Planning and Hands-on Workday Event - June 1, 2, 3.

For more information about the Archives Project, call 
Sandra True at (201) 209-1809

Online registration and information about lodging and meals will be forthcoming.

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