The Bell Tolls For Thee

One of our founders at True Archives has had occasion to travel to three international conferences on archives in recent years, and the hardest thing to find at each one was a session dealing with actual three-dimensional, information-bearing objects. Most presenters spent their time talking about “metadata” and insuring the “authenticity” of electronic records, but actual presentations on how one arranges and describes hundreds of cubic feet of file boxes (a task which is still very much a part of the profession) were almost completely absent. It's as if our colleagues are uninterested in anything they cannot see on a TV screen.

The reason for this is simple. Information Scientists have infiltrated the archival profession and are slowly poisoning the minds of impressionable young graduates just entering the occupation. Just look at the so-called “education calendar” of courses offered by the Society of American Archivists and you will see the unmistakable fingerprints of Information Science. Course after course dealing with zeros and ones, and nought dealing with actual objects. The result will be a cadre of young archivists who will have never suffered a paper cut, or who have even read a document handwritten in cursive. They won’t know a real record even if it “bytes” them.

It is a shame how these fiendish Biblioposers have obliterated the once proud profession of librarians, but now they come for our own colleagues. To paraphrase Thoreau, “wherever an archivist goes, Information Scientists will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.”