When preparing this presentation I initially found it somewhat difficult to
decide what its focus would be. Archival and records management theory and practice,
knowledge management, information technology and diplomacy at first glance seem to be a
pretty disparate group of topics for a 30 minute presentation. It can, however, be done. I
chose to focus on four records-related areas where these issues come together and provide
the greatest challenges to archivists, diplomats, historians and technology providers.
These areas are: (1) validation, (2) trustworthiness, (3) context and (4) longevity.
Having been
intimately concerned with diplomatic records as a creator of them, a consumer of them and
a custodian of them has given me a well-rounded view of their importance, their functions
and their limitations. As a result of my background with the State Archives of Kentucky,
the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. National Archives and my current position as head
of the records section of the Inter-American Development Bank I have become more and more
convinced that an organization which has a well conceived and fully functioning records
management program will have a solid archives and that that archives can be an essential
contributor to the information and knowledge needs of the organization. On the other hand,
an organization which lacks a solid foundation regarding both its current and its
non-current records will be building its information structures on sand and will pay a
heavy price for such a state of affairs. So, with my biases exposed, let us turn to some
definitions of archives and look at their implications for diplomacy, especially in light
of the new technologies.
Definitions of Archives
The archival
Magna Carta is Sir Hilary Jenkinson’s A Manual of Archive Administration,
published in 1922. This manual is the departure point for discussions of archival theory
and practice, at least in the English speaking world. Sir Hilary, in a later essay,
defined archives as "the Documents accumulated by a natural process in the course of
the Conduct of Affairs of any kind, Public or Private, at any date; and preserved
thereafter for Reference, in their own Custody, by the persons responsible for the Affairs
in question or their successors." In an article in the Spring, 1994 issue of the American
Archivist, Luciana Duranti quotes this definition and further cites Jenkinson’s Manual
in which she notes that "because they [archival documents] are created as a means
for, and a by-product of, action, not ‘in the interest or for the information of
Posterity,’ and because they are ‘free from the suspicion of prejudice in regard
to the interests in which we now use them,’ archival documents are impartial and
‘cannot tell…anything but the truth.’" Now this is a startling
concept—that archives are inherently trustworthy and useful precisely because they
were generated as a by-product of recording the daily business transactions of an
organization (or individual) and without regard to how they might be used by other people
for other reasons in other times.
Laundry
lists
A couple of
examples might be illustrative. Consider, for example, the laundry lists of a medieval
monastery and why they might be a very useful research tool. Some monk, or succession of
monks, created, over a period of time, lists of dirty linen and what happened to it. These
records express no interest in anything else going on in their organization, much less in
their society as a whole. Whatever went into the laundry lists was validated as having to
do with that topic by the mere fact of inclusion. Those responsible for the laundry
records did not intermix records dealing with other matters; if it didn’t have to do
with dirty linen, they didn’t accept them. Once accepted as germane, the records were
arranged in ways most useful to the laundry department—by name of monk, by type of
material, by date, whatever was organically most useful to them. The fourth point to note
is, of course, that they survived the vagaries of the centuries.
Exactly because
of this specificity in why they were gathered together (validation); the fact of their
being accepted by the organization as reliable (trustworthy); their internal groupings
(context and arrangement) and their survival (longevity) it is possible to use such
records with confidence in, for example: an analysis of administrative costs of religious
institutions; the names and status of individual monks based on the numbers of articles to
be washed or numbers of changes of clothing; studies of medieval textile trade patterns,
perhaps even determining the names of individual weavers or cloth merchants; the internal
hierarchy of the monastery; liturgical customs based on the use of various vestments; the
dating of visits by passing royalty; seasonal changes in clothing; etc., etc. The very
fact that the creators of the laundry lists were supremely indifferent to providing
information on administrative costs, names and status of monks, the textile trade,
weavers, hierarchies, liturgical issues, royal visits, seasonal changes, etc.,
etc.—makes the information which they provide about these areas so very valuable.
They unconsciously provide the peripheral vision of history, without which history would
suffer from tunnel vision.
As an aside,
the examples I am using here illustrate that diplomatic (and indeed all) archives share
certain common traits which offer particular challenges to the consumers of today’s
information technology. These challenges include the development of computer functionality
for the creation and maintenance of true records. To do this, records produced
electronically must: (1) be able to be validated as being relevant to the business
transaction at hand, (2) provide an environment which will allow records created in the
normal course of business to maintain their inherent trustworthiness, (3) provide some
architecture for maintaining a meaningful relationship among records and, perhaps the most
difficult, (4) ensure survival over time. Surely it is not too much to expect the latest
technology to at least provide the functionalities available to medieval monks.
Concentration
camp records
This continuity
of traits could be illustrated in any number of other examples. The records of
Hitler’s Germany, for instance, captured by the U.S. Army after the fall of Berlin in
1945 were useful at the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg precisely because they were created
without consideration of how they might be used outside the context of their creation.
They did not have subject files arranged under the title "Atrocities" or
"the Holocaust" but rather they were organic records of routine transactions
relating to, for example, the administration of concentration camps. These routine
transactional records might include orders of the day, receipts for supplies (such as
poison gas), bills of lading for the shipment of personal effects (such as eye-glasses and
gold teeth), personnel records which listed everyone from the camp commanders to the
guards (including periods of service and position descriptions), routine periodic reports
from the camp medical unit (which might include the results of experiments on human
beings), mortality registers, incident reports of uprisings and how they were quelled; in
short, all the usual, mundane records likely to be produced in the daily course of
business in a well-ordered military installation. Only by reviewing such routine records
does the full impact of what went on in these camps hit home. And these routine records
were accepted without question by the War Crimes Tribunal because they were inherently
trustworthy. As unalike as these records are from the monastery laundry lists, they share
the common threads mentioned above—they are trustworthy because they had no interest
in documenting anything other than the routine transaction at hand, the act of inclusion
in the files served to validated the records, they were maintained in a meaningful order
and they were preserved over time.
State
Department records
Another body of
records to consider might be those of the U.S. Department of State. Regular reports are
submitted to Washington from all diplomatic and consular posts, and have been since the
1790s. Studies of U.S. foreign policy can be enhanced by going beyond the selected
documents published in the "Foreign Relations of the United States" (the FRUS)
and looking at these raw reports. Indeed, since the documents printed in the FRUS are
selected after the fact, they are inherently less trustworthy than the original reports
which must be, by definition, trustworthy. These reports were filed by name of diplomatic
post and chronologically thereunder. The pre-1903 reports have been microfilmed and are
available for use and purchase at the U.S. National Archives. An early 19th
century consul might never have mentioned the words "foreign policy" in a
report, but his comments on the treatment of U.S. ships by the local harbour master, the
relative status of the U.S. ex-patriot community, the progress of civil and criminal cases
through the local courts, the treatment of U.S. prisoners, the status of negotiations over
export licenses, local gossip, rumours of coups, complaints about the unhealthy climate,
currency fluctuations, local customs, language issues, legal issues, etc., provide a rich
soup of information which was used then in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and which
can be mined for a variety of purposes today. This body of records is still receiving
accretions to this day.
Let’s
follow the path of how more recent diplomatic information becomes a part of these files by
looking at the first foray of a junior foreign service officer into diplomatic reporting
in the mid-1980s. To protect the innocent, let’s call him, oh, Tom, for the sake of
this discussion. Shortly after his arrival at post, where he had begun his first tour as
third secretary working in the consular section on the visa line, Tom attended a large
reception at the ambassador’s residence. The food and liquor were excellent, the
music and the lights were soft, all the movers and shakers were there. In other words, all
the elements were in place for a hard night of diplomatic representational work. Now
I’m not being sarcastic here—this is the setting in which much of the most
important work of diplomacy is done. Here is where information (and misinformation) is
exchanged, where friend and foe are sized up, where friendships are made and rivalries
contested. What is of interest to the archivist, as well as to the historian and the
diplomat, is how such environments produce meaningful records.
Well, back to
Tom. During the course of the evening, he acquired some startling information. It could
have been about currency fluctuations, or export restrictions, or the flow of illegal
aliens, or the love-life of a prominent local figure or any one of a thousand topics. For
the sake of this discussion, let us say that it related to a coup d’etat planned for
the following month. As soon as he could find his consul general, Tom told her of his hot
item and suggested that they notify Washington immediately. She, much wiser than Tom in
the ways of diplomacy and how information was treated, listened and suggested that they
follow the usual channels. (She certainly knew that awakening the Secretary of State at
one in the morning to discuss coup rumours with a junior officer would not be a
career-enhancing move.) Disappointed but undaunted, Tom began to navigate those channels
which would lead his information into the safe waters of the diplomatic archives.
At Tom’s
earliest opportunity he wrote a standard "memcon", or memorandum of
conversation, going on for pages about what an important piece of information he had and
how it would change history. He took the time and trouble to set the scene, providing
copious background information about the party, the ambiance, his reactions to it, how he
thought the information he was sending should be used, whose side we should take in the
imminent civil war, what he thought of all parties concerned, etc., etc. Little did he
realize the process through which his multi-page opus would go before being transformed
from information to record.
The first step
was to transcribe it from hand-written notes into a customized word processing package and
print it out onto a standard form, compatible with the communications equipment in use at
the time which would convert it to a cable and transmit it to Washington. (Now this is an
important part of the validation process—the physical format must be correct or the
record will be summarily rejected.) Excitedly he sat down at the terminal and began to
work. Certain information fields were required, such as drafter. That would be proud young
Tom. Then the system asked for clearances. Young Tom put down his boss, the consul
general. He put in certain codes which were attached to the cable-to-be, such as CO for
consular matters, reflecting his assigned position. Proudly young Tom took the great
document to his boss, sure it would be flashed to Washington at once, re-writing
diplomatic history. Alas, illusions are grand but not always long-lived. The consul
general took a heavy blue pen to the draft, pruning out much deathless prose, not even
trying to be gentle as she pointed out that no one cared that Tom’s favourite scotch
had been served at the party, whether or not the minister of justice’s wife had on
the same dress as someone else, how the newly redecorated residence looked, and certainly
no one wanted Tom’s opinions about the past, present or future. The purpose of the
memcon was to report facts. Analysis was outside its scope. She also pointed out that even
the subject code was incorrect. It had nothing to do with consular affairs, even though
Tom might have been a consular officer. The proper subject was PO for Political issues.
She increased the number of clearances to include the Deputy Chief of Mission and several
others who had been at the reception. Unconsciously, as an organic part of her function,
she was deepening the validation process by making sure that this embryonic document
conformed to the standards of the records system of which it would form a part, both in
terms of format and content. Once she had finished pruning, it went through the clearance
process. The DCM made a few additions to the message, such as the fact that the
high-ranking officer who was the source of this report was involved in a simmering dispute
with another high-ranking officer whose career he had often tried to damage. Another
clearer mentioned that the source had been drinking heavily all evening and that he had
been overheard saying that he was going to "get el Colonel" that night. Other
clearers added other details. When all the clearances were signed off on, the much shorter
cable was taken to communications where it was sent. Once received, it was copied,
distributed and filed with two centuries of similar reports.
Diplomatic
history was not, alas, re-written. No coup occurred. Luckily the "fact" had been
vetted, placed in its context, recorded as a rumour and then properly filed away with all
its brother and sister reports going back two hundred years. Young Tom could, however,
take comfort in the knowledge that he had contributed to both diplomacy and history,
albeit in a very small way, since his information had been converted into something worthy
to be part of the archives of the U.S. Department of State. It had been (1) validated,
making it (2) inherently trustworthy, (3) it had joined with many other accretions to the
reporting files, putting it in its proper context and (4) it would be kept for further
reference.
Other examples
could include aerial photographs of Europe and Japan, Stasi files, secret correspondence
of Louis XV, baggage lists from U.S. immigration, visa files, Czar’s secret police,
and so on and so on, but I think that I have made my point about what gives a record
archival value. I would now like to turn again to the issue which I raised earlier about
new information technologies and the challenges and opportunities they offer to the
"traditional" archives and records keeping systems.
Changes and Challenges Occasioned by Technology
Because of the
very success of archives in storing knowledge, new types of researchers are clamouring at
their doors, demanding information in new formats and with new expectations of what can
and should be done with the information "locked away in dusty old boxes". These
new demands hold great promise and create perils for archives and their users.
One of the
results of this change of users and uses is the blurring of the distinctions between
information and records. All records are information but certainly not all information is
a record. Those who ignore this distinction do so at their peril. Let me give you a couple
of instances to illustrate this distinction and how technology has been involved.
TWA
Flight 800
This blurring
of lines was brought home to me when Pierre Salinger, the former aide to John F. Kennedy,
claimed to have proof that the U.S. Air Force shot down TWA flight 800 over Long Island a
couple of years ago. I remember him standing before the TV cameras in Paris, waving a
piece of paper and saying, "Here is proof that the Air Force did it." As near as
I can figure it out, the following happened. Mr. Salinger knew someone who worked in a
French intelligence service. This person had obtained a copy of something which reportedly
had been acquired by someone with access to the CIA’s computer system. What they
found, and posted on the Internet, was a statement that the Air Force had been
responsible. The mistake that Mr. Salinger made was to transfer the assumed
trustworthiness of a properly "archived" document to a piece of free-floating
information. The information which was obtained (or leaked or planted) was deracinated, it
had no context. Where was it from? Was it indeed from the CIA? If so, how had it been
identified? Was it from their "rumours" file? Or from their "usually
reliable sources" file? Was it in their cables from the field or was it a photocopy
of something from a tabloid which they had as part of their reference files of
nonvalidated information? Had it been forged and put out as part of an attempt to
exculpate the airlines or the manufacturers of the plane or by some conspiracy-obsessed
individual or by someone who wanted to make a movie? Where is it now? It fails every test
of "archivability", to coin an inelegant word. It was nonvalidated,
untrustworthy, without context and impermanent. And yet, because it came from a computer a
person used to handling important information accepted it at face value. Where is
technology taking us?
In the
interests of time, I will pass over the issue of subject files and reference files and how
they relate to archives. This could be the topic of a paper in itself.
To avoid merely
complaining about misapplied technology and get specific I offer the following as minimum
requirements which must be in place before records in electronic format could be
acceptable to archivists, historians, diplomats or anyone else who depends of records on a
daily basis:
If electronic
information is being represented as an archives, the standards which make it inherently
trustworthy should be clearly defined. This can be done, but is expensive and complicated.
Already there are records-keeping standards being developed in Australia and by the U.S.
Department of Defence which are widely available. All of us must be clear that the
computer term "archives" means to make a back-up copy. It has nothing to do with
the functions of an archive. To mention a pet peeve of mine, "archives" is a
noun, never a verb.
Provide
context. A simple, direct-access, relational database is wonderful for quick answers, but
as anyone who has done even a simple search on the Internet knows, the results of that
search may provide you with every single one of the thirty references you may want for
Marie, Princess of Battenberg of the House of Hesse, but if those references are buried
within 250,000 hits covering Battenberg lace, the Hesse Oil Company, the Princess cruise
line, every real estate company selling houses and Herman Hesse, what have you got? In the
field of archival cataloguing some of the most fiendishly difficult challenges involve the
linkages between related files, series, sub-series, documents, etc. It can be done, but is
also expensive and complicated.
Provide
longevity. (This may be the biggest challenge of all.) The current life-expectancy of five
years for a computer application is not enough to guarantee that records will survive for
as long as they are needed. In a related area, I also expect clear distinctions between
the use of computers for access and for preservation and I expect both issues to be
addressed. Confusion between them may present the greatest threat to the continued value
of archives. They are not the same. Indeed they are sometimes diametrically opposed.
Increasing access may put records at risk. Preservation issues may limit access. Those who
say "Let’s use the power of the computers and scanners. Just put everything on
the computer where we can search it and don’t worry about that old-fashioned
paper" make ice-cold chills run up my spine. It’s not the paper I continue to
long for, it’s the overt context I want to see. Another related spine-chilling
comment is, "I’ve got what I need from this database. Just dump it." We do
not have to be Luddites to have concerns about any organization’s commitment to keep
data fresh, to migrate it every five years or so, to keep all the metadata intact and to
keep all the archival relationships clear, especially when the original creator or user
has finished with it. Archivists and historians may know that there are lots of secondary
uses of information, many of which are more important (to us, anyway) than the original
use was. We must make sure that the IT department understands this use. I wonder how many
electronic records will not make it across the Y2K divide because someone will decide that
what’s on them is "just old stuff" or "we’re through with that
file" and throw out the diskettes rather than spend valuable time and money ensuring
that the information is preserved?
Conclusion
So where are
we? Right where we started as far as archival principles go but light-years ahead as far
as the tools available are concerned. Archives (and archivists) have survived paradigm
shifts before; we have gone from clay tablets to papyrus to moveable type to punch cards
and, yes, even diskettes. We’ll survive again. It’s the attrition rate of
information loss as we cross that technological boundary which I would hope to reduce to a
minimum. So let us embrace the power of the computer to provide us with access speeds we
never imagined even a few years ago; let us take advantage of data-mining technologies, of
messaging possibilities, of the Internet and the Intranet and the Web, let us do all we
can do using the technologies on offer, but let us also demand the validating and
relational functions which give archives trustworthiness for as long as they need to be
kept. It would be ironic if the 21st century, instead of leading to a
technological utopia were to lead us backward to an informational Dark Ages where
institutions loose the ability to create and maintain trustworthy records which can stand
as guardians of individual rights and as sources of information which can be used to unite
us. Working together we can ensure that computers will bring us great benefits. Failure to
articulate our mutual needs as information consumers and custodians might well mean that
records-keeping concerns are not addressed when designing information systems and we will
all inadvertently contribute to an epidemic of organizational Alzheimer’s. |
