Archival Power

I didn’t discover the archives until the third year of my undergrad. I was taking a course about public history and we spent one of our classes participating in an archival workshop. We were each assigned a particular archival document and given the task of examining and analyzing it as a primary source. For my part, I couldn’t believe we were actually allowed to touch these old documents and I instantly knew I would be spending a fair amount of time up in the archives. It only took one day for me to make my way back up the stairs and ask how I could become a volunteer.

And that is how the tenth floor of the university library quickly became my happy place at school.

For the next year and a half, I spent countless hours in the reading room—conducting my own research, but also getting to know the archivists and helping out with various tasks. I learned so many new skills including book repairs, encapsulation of documents, creating finding aids and organizing archival materials.

I am currently taking a course about understanding archives as a profession. Despite my previous exposure to the archives, I don’t think I fully understood or appreciated how much theory and debate goes into selecting which materials should be kept and which need to be discarded. It is not possible to keep everything and so hard decisions have to be made.

Which documents should we keep and which do we leave out? What has enduring value? How does the condition and material of sources affect our decision to keep them? Which stories are being told through archival materials? Whose voices are being represented? Whose are missing?

We talk about the idea of bias in museums, about whose perspective is being shown through exhibits and which ideas are being shared. More and more I am understanding how the same is true in the archives. Archival documents and other non-written materials can speak volumes about history. But so can a lack of documents. Silence can be just as significant as story.

Terry Cook, an important Canadian archivist and archival scholar, wrote an article in 1997 about the history and future of archival ideas. One of the concepts that he elaborates on is the idea of the archives as a place of power. Normally, when I think about archives, I’m not sure that “power” is the first word that comes to mind.

The power that Cook discusses is based on the idea of perspective: who is allowed to speak and who is forced to be silent. He writes, that archives “had their institutional origins in the ancient world as agents for legitimizing such power and for marginalizing those without power.”[1] In other words, archives control which histories are remembered and which are forgotten. They control who is allowed to influence society and who is pushed to the outer circle. And it is the histories that are remembered, those who are allowed to speak, that shape our worldview.

This is power. And, this is why it is so important to understand archives.

[1] Terry Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43 (1997): 18.