Archives

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Archives IdentityThe record is always in the
process of becoming yes but becoming what?
Louise Craven, TNASeptember 2007
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Agenda

• what is identity for user?
• can other disciplines help?
• philosophical?
• postmodern?

• ideas from cultural studies
• endorsed by experience
• new developments in archive theory

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Sue McKemmish, Are archives ever actual?

• inThe Records Continuum, Sue McKemmish Michael
  Piggot (eds), Society of Australian Archivists,
  Ancora, 1994

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Definitions of identity

• consumption
• language
• buildings
• memory

• the past
• meaning
• post colonialism
• place

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In Museums

• Andrew Newman, International Centre for
• Cultural Heritage Studies, . 2006
• identity constructed and re-constucted
• museums facilitate identity construction .

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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

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Many readings and many meanings of a Will ?

• archivist
• social historian
• medical researcher
• statistician

• biographer
• family historian
• land registry
• local historian

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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..

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Individual experience

• Meaning
• Identity
• The content becomes the context

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Developments in archival theory..

• User focussed
• What is provenance?
• Professor Tom Nesmith. postmodernist
  view.American Archivist, 2007, 65, 1

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The record and the profession..

• In the process of becoming..?

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