The Person Who Keeps the Records
What actually destroys an archive?
Almost never fire, and almost never water, although those are what people picture.
What destroys an archive is a change of building, a change of software, and a change of the person who understood the filing. Any two of those in the same decade and you are in real trouble. All three and it is usually gone, even though every box is still physically there.
So the material survives but the access does not.
Yes. And I would say the access is the archive. The boxes on their own are storage.
A lot of people building new systems assume that recording more is safer. Do you agree?
No, and I would push back on that quite hard.
Every item you add has to be described, and every description has to be maintained, and maintenance budget does not grow just because your collection did. What you get from recording everything is a larger collection that is described worse. I have received several of those. They are harder to work with than smaller collections that were curated.
What makes a record still useful in fifty years?
That someone can tell what it is without asking anyone.
It sounds obvious. It is the thing that fails most often. So much of what gets written down assumes context that was ambient at the time — an abbreviation everybody in the room understood, a reference to a project by its nickname. Fifty years later that is just noise, and the item is effectively undescribed.
Is there anything you would tell someone starting an archive now?
Decide what you are not going to keep, and write that decision down too.
Everyone documents what they collected. Almost nobody documents what they deliberately excluded and why. That second document is the one future users will need, because without it they cannot tell the difference between a gap in the collection and a gap in the world.
Highlights
Most of the conversation was about failure modes rather than best practice. The recurring point: archives are rarely lost in a single event. They are lost gradually, by becoming slightly harder to use each year until nobody uses them, and then by being disposed of on the grounds that nobody uses them.
There was also a firm disagreement — recorded above — with the idea that recording more is safer.
Key Takeaways
- A record survives because it is used. Anything that reduces use is an existential risk, not an inconvenience.
- The most common cause of loss is not destruction. It is the quiet accumulation of small barriers to access.
- Completeness and usefulness pull against each other. A record that contains everything is read by nobody.
- Every archive depends on somebody choosing to keep paying for it. That decision is renewed constantly and is never guaranteed.
- Role
- Archivist
- Years in the work
- 11
- Specialism
- Collections transferred from institutions that closed
- First contact
- Cold email, answered the same day