15
th
International Congress on Archives
Owens
www.wien2004.ica.org
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people's memories both to confirm our own and to give them endurance.
provide affirmation of past events and the capacity for long-term protection. The conceptual examination of
memory is pervasive among homo sapiens. Our identity is expressed in systematic terms based upon our ability
to maintain and utilise memory.
Archival records speak and echo a voice. Research, interpretation, writing and publishing allow the
records to speak and broadcast. Exhibition provides another voice. Active engagement of individuals and
archival records can result in transmission of ideas. One such example is the programme, Project Naming, at the
National Archives of Canada which has successfully brought together the Inuit, of Northern Canada, who have
examined and identified thousands of photos taken from the 1920s to the 1940s. By identifying ancestors,
context and geographic locations of images on archival photographs, contemporary people have been actively
engaged in speaking their own cultural voice. The archives are echoing and transmitting another memory.
We archivists convey the key concepts of memory. The public release of records within an archival
institution triggers societal memory, both by the reading and the transmission of the opening and the news
releases. If the focused event or memory had been experienced or remembered by living individuals then the
memories of these individuals are enhanced, as well.
We treasure connections with the wider past. Gratified that our memories are our own, we also seek to
link our personal past with collective memory and public history. People widely recall their own thoughts and
actions at moments of public crisis because they jump at the chance to connect themselves with a meaningful
cosmos. People are so eager to be part of `history' that they falsely `remember' their responses to, or even
having been present at, some momentous event.
towards the past. We are provided with a resource to link ourselves with an antecedent event. The archival
record can confirm our own identity with a former phenomenon, or we can also have our personal memory
altered, or even shattered with the revelation of the truth. The written word maintained in the archives has
power to confirm and to transform that which we believe to be accurate and substantive memory.
In the literary world writers are focusing on the post-modern relation with the past. Personal memories
and remembrances are examined and scrutinised and balanced by using manuscripts, photographs and the other
offerings of the archives. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace is such an example. Her novel focuses on a
nineteenth century Canadian woman enmeshed in a murder. Atwood made extensive use of government,
religious and legal archives to enlighten strengthen and memorialise her narrative of Canadian social life a
century and a half ago. Atwood conjoined with the archival record have become active agents in the
transmission of memory.
The archives is not the only institution engaged in the preservation of memory; museums are active
museum operates at several levels; as a resource and a product in perpetual stages of flux; memory is no more
static in the fixed space of a museum than it is in the fertile depths of our brains. Each memory, rather than
being a single artifact of the past or unique imprint, is a production that emerges over time and in the present, in
response to and through the integration of memory cues and memories.
We can draw parallels with the
archival institution for every memory in the archives is in continuous change responding to new interpretations
of thought and integrated with new and enlightening informational cues.
Archivists respect the conceptual idea of knowledge. Even if an idea is not recognised by the current
8
Lowenthal, David L. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 196.
9
Lowenthal, David L. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 197.
10
Crane, Susan A. "Memory, distortion, and history in the museum." History and theory. vol. 36, no 4. Theme
Issue 36: Producing the past: making histories inside and outside the Academy. (Dec. 1997), pp. 44-63. p. 44.
11
Crane, Susan A. "Memory, distortion, and history in the museum." History and theory. vol. 36, no 4. Theme
Issue 36: Producing the past: making histories inside and outside the Academy. (Dec. 1997), pp. 44-63. p. 49.
