Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment (review)

Enduring Paradigm, New Opportunities: The Value of the Archival Perspective in the Digital Environment,Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland. Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2000. 43 p. $15 (ISBN 1-887334-74-2) Document (PDF and HTML) available at <http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub89abst.html>

In 1977 at the Society of American Archivists meeting in Utah, I listened to Canadian archivist Hugh Taylor describe how the theoretical orientation that characterized archival work was an adaptive and flexible tool that could lead to archivists becoming holders of the keys to the kingdom in an environment of scarcity, localism, and the urgent need for energy efficiency. Against the backdrop of a nascent environmental movement and business downsizing, economists were contemplating a new order governed by scarcity of energy and diminished prospects for growth and prosperity. Taylor alluded to E.F. Schumacher' Small Is Beautiful (Harper & Row, 1973), as an example of how economic change could create opportunities for archival theory to adapt to current needs.

Twenty-five years later, archivist Anne Gilliland-Swetland, on the faculty of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, has turned her attention to this same archival theoretical construct, now termed "the archival paradigm," to assay how it might be applied to the new digital environment. Gilliland-Swetland, in this report to the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), first outlines the main lineaments of the archival paradigm and then applies the paradigm to a series of policy issues that characterize the new digital environment.

In describing the archival paradigm, the author first outlines deftly the societal role of archives (as distinguished from that of museums and libraries) before turning to the paradigm itself. She identifies five essential principles as constituting the paradigm: the sanctity of evidence; respect des fonds, provenance, and original order; the life cycle of records; the organic nature of records; and hierarchy in records and their descriptions. She elaborates on each principle, clearly describing and analyzing each in turn. She manages her broad canvass in a comparatively concise if dense manner, integrating and explaining a significant amount of work in the process.

In the final part of her report, Gilliland-Swetland applies the paradigm to the digital environment, arguing that the paradigm can contribute to the management of digital information, and that, indeed, the archival community is already making significant contributions. Specifically, she alludes to the topics of the integrity of information, metadata, knowledge management, risk management, and knowledge preservation as areas in which this contribution is already underway, citing projects in which the archival participation is essential if not dominant.

Gilliland-Swetland's claims for the accomplishments in the new digital environment may strike some as a stretch, asserting as she does that the paradigm has contributed to the management of digital information, citing projects whose findings and results are not yet fully at hand. But she is right to call attention to the need for additional dialogue among those from a variety of additional information communities, whose perspectives and functional requirements are equally important to the successful management of digital information.

One hopes that her call will prevail over the somewhat surprising "Preface" to this report by Abby Smith, Director of Programs for CLIR, who notes that "archivists deal with only one type of document--a record--libraries deal with many. And while archivists are responsible for information within a controlled environment, librarians routinely handle information that crosses many technological and administrative barriers in the course of its life cycle." (p. iv) Those who manage library collections may be surprised by this characterization, particularly in light of the experience of those who found that the AMC format, based on archival theory and practice, was helpful in cataloguing a variety of formats in research collections that were not otherwise easily...