Archives & Identity: ‘The record is always in the process of becoming’: yes but becoming...

Archives & Identity:

‘The record is always in the process of

becoming’: yes but becoming what?

Louise Craven, TNA

September 2007

Agenda

•what is identity for user?

•can other disciplines help?

•philosophical?

•postmodern?

• ideas from cultural studies

• endorsed by experience

• new developments in archive theory

Sue McKemmish, ‘Are archives ever actual?’ inThe Records Continuum, Sue McKemmish & Michael Piggot (eds), Society of Australian Archivists, Ancora, 1994

Definitions of identity

• consumption …

• language…

• buildings …

• memory…

• the past …

• meaning …

• post colonialism …

• place …

In Museums …

Andrew Newman, International Centre for Cultural & Heritage Studies, …. 2006

… ‘identity constructed and re-constucted… museums ‘facilitate identity construction’ ….

Postmodernist interpretation….New views!

Adherence to any shool of thought from classicism to modernism no longer necessary!

one text … many neanings….

Wheee!!

Apply to archival text

Many readings and many meanings of a Will ?• archivist

• social historian

• medical researcher

• statistician

• biographer

• family historian

• land registry

•local historian

Cultural texts

Relationship to text: ‘Structure of feeling’: from Raymond Williams The Long Revolution, 1961

Online: relationship to graphic ? Like film: visual and intimate: from Genre and Cinema, 1981

Comments from volunteer projects…..

Individual experience…Meaning…

Identity

The content becomes the context

Developments in archival theory..User focussed

What is provenance?

Professor Tom Nesmith…. postmodernist view….American Archivist, 2007, 65, 1

The record and the profession..

In the process of becoming…..?