#terry cook

[wurenjieting]

... Cook asserted that societal values should be at the heart of appraisal and that societal values could be best understood through a structual-functional analysis of the interaction of the state and its citizens. At the heart of macroappraisal is the idea that it is not the circumscribed notion of government that needs to be documented, but a far broader concept of governance with all its attention to processes, interactions, and relationships. Macroappraisal therefore is the quest to "specify the generic attributes, interconnections, and points of special intersection or conflict between creators of records (structures, agencies, people), sociohistorical trends and pattern (functions, activities, programs), and the clients, customers or citizens upon whom both structure and function impinge, and who in turn influence both function and society, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly".

—— Ciaran B. Trace, "On or Off the Records? Notion of Value in the Archive", Currents of Archival Thinking

[wurenjieting]

Both advocates struggled for ascendancy in defining the archival identity, of what it meant and means to be an archivist, how she or he should be educated, what should be the primary emphasis of his or her work. The literature abounds with labels reflecting determinations of whether the archivist was keeper, undertaker, or auditor; monk, knight, or artist; curator, manager, or activist; editor, translator, or advocate; of whether archivy was art or science, modern or postmodern; of whether the archival profession itself should be populated with archivists, or with recordkeepers (in alliance or merged with records managers), or with informational professionals (in alliance with librarians, and possibly museum curators).

—— Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms"

[wurenjieting]

Nor is it, as some ‘‘pro-evidence’’ archivists like to imagine, another manifestation of the supposed archival aberration caused by the French Revolution, when state archives abandoned their allegedly original juridical calling and linked themselves with nationalism and national culture, Romanticism and its idealization of the past, and the nineteenth-century rise of history as an academic discipline, and as a cornerstone of national identity.

—— Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms"

[wurenjieting]

From this perspective, then, archives are constructed memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and familial connections, and about who we are as human beings; as such, they offer glimpses into our common humanity. Yet memory is notoriously selective—in individuals, in societies, and, yes, in archives. With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others. Memory, and forgetting, can serve a whole range of practical, cultural, political, symbolic, emotional and ethical imperatives and is central to power, identity, and privilege.

—— Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms"

[wurenjieting]

What makes us all archivists? Archivists are not archivists because they do the same things in different places (appraise, acquire, process, describe, preserve, make available), or because they or others find what they do to be ‘‘valuable,’’ but because what they do has its own societal significance and impact, its own community of meaning, its own transcendence beyond the mundane to the ideal, the individual to the communal.

—— Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms"

[wurenjieting]

Perhaps, however, we archivists need to be more self-conscious about the distinction, in our field, and in our work, between our many processes of archiving and our end product, the archive. Perhaps in such processes, we embed our own identity and our own collective memory and mythologies. Perhaps in defining and carrying out these processes, we have found our sense of community as like-minded professionals.

—— Terry Cook, "Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms"

[mathom-house-curator]

...Archives are constructed memories about the past, about history, heritage, and culture, about personal roots and familial connections, and about who we are as human beings; as such, they offer glimpses into our common humanity. Yet memory is notoriously selective—in individuals, in societies, and, yes, in archives. With memory comes forgetting. With memory comes the inevitable privileging of certain records and records creators, certain functions, activities, and groups in society, and the marginalizing or silencing of others. Memory, and forgetting, can serve a whole range of practical, cultural, political, symbolic, emotional and ethical imperatives and is central to power, identity, and privilege.

Terry Cook, “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms” (2012)

[mathom-house-curator]

Perhaps, however, we archivists need to be more self-conscious about the distinction, in our field, and in our work, between our many processes of archiving and our end product, the archive. Perhaps in such processes, we embed our own identity and our own collective memory and mythologies. Perhaps in defining and carrying out these processes, we have found our sense of community as like-minded professionals. The border between impartial archives, on the one hand, and researcher or societal interpretation of the archive, on the other, may well be a good deal more porous and interactive than often supposed. That ambiguity should be recognized, and embraced, as the desirable path for archives in the twenty-first century.

Terry Cook, “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms” (2012)