15
th
International Congress on Archives
Owens
www.wien2004.ica.org
4
generation, it may have utilitarian brilliance in another time period. The insight of some individuals is so
revolutionary that it is not understood and appreciated by contemporaries. It is the archival institution which
maintain this memory and is capable of transmitting it to future generations who are better educated and
advanced and more receptive to interpret and accept these ideas.
One of the prime purposes of memory, as well as sustaining the past, is to adapt it to cultivate and
rethink the past. Archives must adapt its resources in the enriching and manipulating of memory. Historians
use the same body of records, but may interpret these is differing ways. In different time periods we use
differing bits, dependent on the questions or the particular memory we wish to enliven and broadcast. Archives
relive and revive the past. Archives hold relics and recorded information. Our individual memories are
fractious, destructible and malleable. Hence the need to maintain a recorded memory.
Commemoration is a form of individual and societal recognition of memory and manifestation. Public
commemoration acknowledges those events which some have deemed importance: war, people, peace, political
leaders, etc. Archival institutions thus serve as public monuments to this social and collective memory.
Archival memory is a collective concern with the capacity to recollect lives. The archives defines the
social group. The extent and breadth of archival collections determine the structure and ability of recall. The
archives provides a foundation for social communication. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made
innovative use of archival resources with its thirty-two hour series Canada, a people's history. In the same way,
The British Broadcasting Corporation recently broadcast Peter Ackroyd's London, utilising text, prints and
other highly prized archival items. Users of archives culturally appropriate archival resources and develop an
image of things past and unknown. The accuracy of memory is limited to the skills of the researcher. However,
in the process imagery is created. The Archives become a cosmology of the self and the archives, once again, is
viewed as a transmitter of memory.
Archivists are entrusted with the responsibility of the safeguarding of memory. The written word and
all the media upon which it is inscribed is susceptible to destruction. This is an interruption of the transmission
of memory. It leads to a form of societal amnesia, or societal Alzheimer's Disease. We, as professional
archivists are charged with the maintenance and preservation of memory and the transmission of that memory.
Societal memory is susceptible to external and internal forms of aggression. There have been
deliberate and non-deliberate attempts to remove the written word from our grasp. Devastating acts contributing
to the destruction of manuscripts have assisted in the eradication of social memory. There have been many
occasions of annihilation and removal from the planet of institutional archives. We have shared in the initial
horror of learning of the destruction of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in
Sarajevo in 1992; the State Archives in Prishtina, Kosovo in 1999; and only last year the Irag National Museum
in Baghdad. These acts of extirpation can be likened to cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is broader than the
mass killing of people and removal of property. Cultural genocide is also the directed destruction of a culture's
written documentation. The destruction of archival records is a blatant destruction of the transmission of ideas
and the obliteration of memory. Archivist must safeguard their institutions against a multitude of attacks, both
from within and from without. The one common goal of all information keepers is the preservation of their
collections.
Archivists are agents of memory and accountability. Accountability results in a collective or societal
memory. Responsible record-keeping leads to a fuller and more complete memory. Irresponsible records-
keeping leads to partial societal amnesia. Through thorough planning and engagement of many different people
in facing archival disaster, we provide a voice and an active role to citizenry; this is symbolic of hope and of
memory.
Archival records are kept against the lapse of memory and devouring time. Despite the prevalence of
forgeries and copying errors many manuscripts remain reasonably veracious accounts. Memory is seldom
consciously revised, historians deliberately reinterpret the past through the lens of subsequent events and ideas.
Both history and memory engender new knowledge, but only history intentionally sets out to do so.
12
Lowenthal, David L. The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 214.
