Arch Sci (2007) 7:133145 DOI 10.

1007/s10502-007-9045-7 ORIGINAL PAPER

Beyond chip monks and paper tigers: towards a new culture of archival format specialists
Joanna Sassoon

Received: 10 July 2006 / Accepted: 19 March 2007 / Published online: 14 July 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract The emergence of the new format of electronic/digital records provides the opportunity for archivists to reconsider the presumed format-neutrality of professional practice. As research in electronic records has served to re-emphasise, without an understanding of the needs and forms of material, then the work of archivists can have a profound impact on the evidential value and long-term research potential of the material. This paper attempts to broaden the debate about the requirements of all archival formats, and to build a new regime of 21st-century format specialists. Keywords Photographic archives Electronic records Archival education Special formats

Ten years ago in his speculative paper looking at what archivists will need to know in the 21st century, Tom Nesmith saw that as a result of computerisation, archivists may be able to concentrate far more on the increasingly intellectual aspects of our work, particularly in appraisal, description and widening public understanding of archives and uses of archives. He predicted that liberated from some of the physical constraints of traditional archival records, the next century may yet permit us to see the fullment of our hope that archives become a well understood and commonly used feature of our communities (Nesmith 1996). These ideas were prescient in their time, yet with hindsight, the course of archival theory and practice has so far turned out at a tangent to these predictions. As Nesmith foresaw, archivists at the beginning of the 21st century

This paper acknowledges a long tradition of inventive titles for papers about archival issues, not least, in this case, from Taylor Hugh A (2005) Chip Monks at the gate: the impact of technology on archives, libraries and the user. AABC Newsletter 14(4):18. J. Sassoon (&) School of Computer and Information Sciences, Edith Cowan University, 2 Bradford Street, Mt Lawley, Perth, WA 6050, Australia e-mail: jsassoon@graduate.uwa.edu.au

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have, in one sense, been liberated from the constraints of physical formats. However, the emergence of a new format which is both technologically dependent and potentially ephemeralthat of the electronic recordhas somewhat shackled the recordkeeping mind. While archivists are undertaking the externally focussed public advocacy work including the selective digitisation of pre-existing original materials, the new format of born-electronic records, seen as the biggest challenge of our era (Upward 2005, p. 221), has stimulated recordkeepers into protracted and heated debates ... over the nature of records, the processes and procedures surrounding their creation, and the measures that archival institutions and others must take to preserve and provide access to a past inscribed on digital media (Hedstrom 2002, p. 22). More specically, the emergence of electronic records has led to a reconceptualisation of how the nature of the record and archives may inuence recordkeeping practices into the future. At present these debates are focussed on electronic records, but there is more mileage on this issue to be had within the recordkeeping debates than looking at this format alone. Understanding that signicant transformations involve interactions between presents and their pasts (Hedstrom 2002, p. 27), this debate has the potential to encourage recordkeepers with their newly reconceptualised ideas about the record and archives derived from the debates about electronic records, to re-focus their ideas towards the many formats in operational and archival custody. Harnessed in this way, the debates surrounding electronic records may serve to reshape the presumption of format neutrality within archival practice. Terry Cook has written that the archival profession is obsessed with electronic records (Cook 2004, p. 1), and one measure of how the challenges posed by this new format have focussed archivists is found in the reviews of major research projects in the recordkeeping area (Couture 2001; Gilliland and McKemmish 2004). These reviews identify electronic records as a priority theme (Couture 2001, p. 172) and make comment that this issue has commanded considerable nancial support for research (Gilliland and McKemmish 2004, p. 159). What is notable about these reviews is their denition of what constitutes the sources for and knowledge around archival science, and while providing a good literature review of core archival journals, they do not look at the format-based research centred around archival theories and practices, which may take place in other discipline-based journals. As a consequence of these research reviews, the image that emerges of archival research is somewhat skewed and leaves the impression that the focus of most archival research over the past decade has been on creating and implementing standards, recordkeeping requirements, process templates and system architectures. It has not been on the substance or even nature of the archival contextual knowledge needed to put inside these empty shells to make them mean anything (Cook and Schwartz 2002, p. 175). This comment accords with that of Richard Cox where, in the context of reviewing electronic records management literature, he writes that the disciplinary range of these citations reects that archivists are still looking primarily at themselves for solutions (Cox 2000, p. 5). What is required is a more multidisciplinary review of research relating to

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archives and archival materials from outside core archival journals.1 From this, other kinds of research questions and methods may be incorporated into a broader church of archival research. The tenor and fervour of debates around the nature of electronic records, and the process driven characteristics of recordkeeping practices and research, raise some as yet unasked questions relating to the purportedly format-neutral approach to archival research and practices. At the same time as these debates have been raging, the fundamental archival principles of respect des fonds and original order have, to date, emerged intact. On the one hand, rst-generation debates surrounding electronic records have embedded denitions into international standards. However, the maturity of the thinking which has developed surrounding restating and redening the essence and character of electronic records, and how these may inuence recordkeeping practices (Roberts 1994) has yet to stimulate further discussions relating to other archival formats. Why these debates have not been translated outside the narrow connes of electronic records requires some further investigation, and perhaps some second- and third-generation thinking. Does the emergence of a recognisably new and different format of electronic records, which has led to the creation of specialist positions in archival institutions, mean it is still tenable for recordkeeping to retain the idea that it is a format-neutral profession? Has the thinking on electronic records shown that the new ideas relating to this specic format can be applied across the gamut of formats, or does it show that archivists now need to focus on a new set of complexities for other archival formats? Do we have to consider that a well-rounded 21st century recordkeeper working in the digital world still needs a bit of a paper mind (Cook 1994)? Why debate has been focussed solely on the specic format of electronic records rather than looking at the idea of format within recordkeeping, may relate to urgencies to provide solutions to the ephemeral nature of the medium, but has the advent of electronic records revealed some pre-existing but often ignored complexities of other archival formats? Can debates about archival formats combine the need to respect the differences between traditional and electronic formats with an acknowledgement that there are underlying fundamental principles or archival practices which are common to all formats? Out of these questions, it can be seen that it is time to harness the tensions between, and energies of, both the chip monks who worship digital technology, and paper tigers who are tethered to the material world, to broaden the debate about the requirements of all archival formats, and to re/build a new regime of 21st century format specialists.

Format The question naturally arises as to why the archival profession sees itself as format-neutral when the practices derive from those developed for text-based materials, but it is outside the scope of this paper to pursue this point. Nevertheless, it is important to note the effects of archival practice which have always been based on theory derived from textual materials. In this context Joan Schwartz argues that the various forms of photographic materials, like electronic images, are not only voluminous and highly fugitive, but also demanding
1

For example see the special section Archives: space and power in Archivaria 61 which reviews the way archives are discussed in the journal History of the human sciences, in scholarly works about the archive which are inuenced by Foucault and Derrida, and how ideas in cultural geography intersect with archival science.

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of tailored visual, rather than hand-me-down textual approaches (Schwartz 2004, p. 109). Building on the recognition that the particular form of photographs gives them unique documentary value (ODonnell 1994, p. 108), Alan Trachtenberg writes, camera-made images have no special privilege as documents of culture. But they have their own resources, different in kind from those of paint or stone or ink and pen (Trachtenberg 1989, p. 288). That photographs as physical objects have a range of intrinsic qualities is taken further by Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, when arguing that, as material objects, photographs are not only chemical deposits on paper but draw meanings from their presentational forms (Edwards and Hart 2004, pp. 13). The need for archivists to understand special formats, and to translate these understandings into archival practice is not new. Prior to explorations of the essence of a record as a way of determining the characteristics that must be preserved for the record to maintain its meaning in the digital world (Heslop et al. 2002, p. 13), there has been serious thinking about specic formats and their needs within the archival context. For example, Elisabeth Kaplan wrote, in the context of archivists needing to be visually literate, that understanding the characteristics of visual materials is crucial to archival practices such as appraisal, arrangement and description (Kaplan and Mifin 1996, p. 108). As the research work in electronic records has served to re-emphasise, without an understanding of the needs and forms of material, then the work of archivists can have a profound impact on the evidential value and long-term research potential of the material. Academic studies based on photographic archives are instructive for archivists wishing to learn about format sensitivity and research potential, and they serve the cause of advocating format specic management within archives. In his seminal work on the General Electric photographic archive, David Nye mused that when faced with an extensive photograph archive he looked through it in its entirety and he began to see patterns emerge that inevitably would have been lost in any selection of the best images. Moreover, in perusing the whole archive, he poses the question (as if it is straight out of archival theory) if one did not understand that primary order, could one reliably impute meaning or purpose to any of the photographs? In taking the whole archive as his subject, he wrote that it made no sense, however, to view the photographs in isolation, as matters of pure form. His book placed the archival photographs within the contexts of their production, consumption and preservation, and is a demonstration of an analysis co-incidentally based on archival theory applied to the specic format of photographs (Nye 1985). Likewise, in studying how photographs express government attitudes and shape public opinion and the degree to which audiences are complicit in, or resistant to, this manipulation, Osborne demonstrates the need to understand the context of production and consumption of government photographs, and the multiple gazes of bureaucracy, the public and the subjects surrounding and contained within photographs (Osborne 2003). These kinds of studies demonstrate the need for good documentation of multiple contexts of production and consumption, to facilitate understanding complex histories in which the photographs played a part. For photography theorists such as John Berger, the simplicity with which we usually treat the experience [of looking at a photograph] is wasteful and confusing (Berger 1980, p. 294). Victor Burgin builds on the illusion of simplicity when he writes that the intelligibility of the photograph is no simple thing; photographs are texts inscribed in terms of what we may call photographic discourse (Burgin 1982, p. 144). John Tagg, who, like Nye, studied specic photographic archives, sees that what makes a photograph real is more than merely print on paper, and that what is real is not just the material item, but also the discursive system of which the image bears its part (Tagg 1988, p. 4). He sees

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that it is the combination of the evidential force of an image with the power of the apparatuses of the local state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth (Tagg 1988, p. 64). Using more recognisably archival language, Allan Sekula writes that even though a photograph is mechanically produced and therefore it would seem that there is little lost in the process of translation into an image it is clear that photographic meaning depends largely on context (Sekula 1983, p. 195). Taking further the idea that context contributes to meaning, John Walker writes that context continues to inuence our perception because, although our attention is primarily directed towards the image, we always retain a subsidiary awareness of its/our environment (Walker 1997, p. 56). As those who have a deep and theoretical understanding of photography demonstrate, photographic archives can be researched to reveal relationships between the images and their creators and functional structures. Through such research, they demonstrate the need for archivally nuanced management of photographic archives so as to realise the research potential of the material. While it is acknowledged that as shapers of archives, archivists add layers of meaning, yet these layers of meaning have become naturalised and internalised, and thus remain unquestioned (Cook and Schwartz 2002, p. 181), the power that archivists exert on shaping meaning through their professional practices of appraisal, and arrangement and description has yet to be a source of forensic study. Equally, why recordkeepers do what they do with archival materials in order to preserve archival integrity is important to understand. Anthropologists and material culture theorists add to the archival argument relating to the inuence of human transactions on the meaning of objects. This body of theory contains arguments that items cannot be fully understood at one single point in their existence but must be examined through the processes of production, exchange and consumption (Kopytoff 1986). In this context, Nicholas Thomas sees cultural objects as socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in deance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgement it prompts, and the narrative it recalls are all historically regured ... something which effaces the intention of the things producers (Thomas 1991, p. 125). Drawing on this approach, and explaining the potential multiple meanings of objects in museums, Elizabeth Edwards writes things have accumulative histories that draw their signicances from intersecting elements in their histories (Edwards 2001, p. 13). In looking at the reception and reuse of colonial photographs by Indigenous Australians, Jane Lydon moves beyond the image as evidence or proof of a single transaction and looks to histories of ownership and multiple cultural contexts of transactions in which the photographs played a part (Lydon 2006). And archival science is beginning to draw on this approach to understanding the complexity of meanings, as Sue McKemmish states that the record is always in the process of becoming (McKemmish 2005, p. 9), and Barbara Reed acknowledges that there are points of stasis in the record (Reed 2005, p. 128). From drawing these kinds of connections, it becomes clear that ideas from material culture theory can enrich continuum debates in archives with an understanding that through their lives, objects (or in this case records) take meanings from their contexts, and as the contexts change so do the meanings, despite the materially stable nature of the original item. However, many historians, including the late Raphael Samuel who considered archivists and librarians as the Poor Bloody Infantry of the profession (Samuel 1994, pp. 1819), have yet to understand the active role that archivists and librarians play in pre-cooking the raw materials of history (Elkner 2003, p. 55). The historian Marcus Bloch directed

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comments about collecting, not at archivists per se but at the historians who should be analysing how the actions and transactions by archivists inuence how history can be written. He wrote that, documents do not suddenly materialize, in one place or another, as if by some mysterious decree of the gods. Their presence or absence in the depths of this archive, or that library, are due to human causes which by no means elude analysis (Bloch 1954, p. 31). Scholars outside history have analysed the effects of human causes on the way that the essential characteristics of archival authenticity can so easily be destroyed and become mere collections. Commenting on the process of collecting, Susan Stewart observed that once the object is completely severed from its origin, it is possible to generate a new series, to start again within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector (Stewart 1984, p. 152). The movement from an archive to a collection is characterised by a change in the unity and coherence which is derived from the collector who constructs a narrative of luck which replaces the narrative of production (Stewart 1984, p. 165). Placement in a collection with new and synthetic associations and dislocated from their original contexts of production and function, that is, without its integrity or source of evidential values, restores not the original intent of the creator but an imaginary context of origin relating to the new collector, and as evidence it becomes untrustworthy (Stewart 1984, p. 150; MacNeil 2001). Sekula notes that without documentation of the production or functional context, or having been removed from their original archival contexts, collections of these individual photographic objects become homogenised with other collections into what he terms a mere territory of images which contain a clearing house of meaning (Sekula 1983, p. 194). In this sense, removal of photographs from an archive and their placement in a new collection suspends old/original meanings and archival values and creates new ones without the integrity of the archival anchor. Academics using photographic archives have made specic comment on the explicit effect of archivists and collection managers actions in the research process in similar vein to Stewart and Sekula, and their comments should be of concern to archivists. Julie K. Brown wrote that the lack of information kept by some collecting institutions on their original as well as copied material, has made it difcult in many cases to trace the original social function of the photograph (Brown 1985, ii; Appadurai 1986). Edwards also notes that collection documentation and management practices can hinder rather than help researchers. She sees that internal institutional politics and values cause this situation, as the low status of photographs and the methods of documentation within institutions have together destroyed any potential archival meanings (Edwards 2001, p. 35). Taking this further, Patricia Hayes builds on Edwards point about the different values which institutions accord to different forms of materials. During her research on Namibian photographs she noted institutional practices demonstrated that great pains are taken to conserve documentary material in its structural, chronological, political and historical context. However, she noted this care of documentary material contrasts with the mass removal of photographs from their original contexts, and writes that had the massive dehistoricisiation and decontextualisation ... occurred with documents, [it] would create a massive scandal (Hartmann et al. 1998, p. 6) These criticisms of archival practices of custodial institutions by researchers who understand the evidential values of photographs provide clear demonstration that, far from being format-neutral, what archivists do to photographic materials demonstrates a lack of understanding of the specic needs of formats in their custody.

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Digital domain This lack of understanding of the characteristics of original photographic materials, and the role of archivists and collection managers in shaping meaning, is magnied when moving original archival materials into the digital context. Technology and format come together in the digital domain, where born-material items, including photographs, are transformed into digitised images to facilitate wider access. Ironically, this domain also reveals the digital divide in the clarity of thinking about the record between the born-material and born-digital worlds. As Reed argues when restating the conceptualisation of a record, the critical characteristic is that a record has to be linked to doing something it is inherently transactional in its nature ... the distinguishing factor which makes records is that they are managed in a particular way to ensure that [these] characteristics ... are present (Reed 2005, p. 102). In translating the idea of recordness to the photograph, there is more to a photograph than what it is of. It is its transactional nature and the complex relationship between its content, structure and context which gives photographs their meaning. Whilst this idea of recordness is generally better understood in the born-digital world of text, this recordness does not appear to be practised in the world where material originals (predominantly photographs) are transformed into digital objects. The digitising process and the viewing technology encourages a focus on content, and this can lead to pressure for individual items to be selected more for their aesthetic content than their archival values. Through their own actions (albeit at times under pressure), archivists are active in replacing the original narrative of production with new institutional narratives of luck born in the digital domain. Through this, and where images are posted on websites as single items without reference to context or presentational form, digitisation is creating a databank of orphans which have been removed from their transactional origins and evidence of authorial intent. This loss of an archival anchor is magnied and long-lasting (Sassoon 2004). In the reverse of David Nyes experience in the General Electric archive, in the digital context, researchers may not have the luxury of understanding the original order of large archives, and the selection of images results in the loss of observable patterns within the broader archive. That the transformation of a photographic archive to digital orphans has occurred demonstrates contemporary thinking about the archival qualities of photographs. In essence archivists see the simplicity of the image content of photographs rather than think about the complexity of the nature of the recordness of photographic archives. Photographs are complex, multilayered objects whose archival values derive from series of interrelationships between photographs and other archival formats, and the dynamics between what is visible and what is invisible. What is invisible are the ephemeral, provenance-based relationships from which archives in original order gain their authenticity, and where viewing serial relationships provides evidence of the broader warps and wefts which are inaccessible when seeing a single thread. Seduced by both the subject content and visual qualities of photographic archives, and the ease of access that digitisation technology affords, archivists are overseeing the erosion of the transactional nature of records and core principles of archival practice. Far from Nesmiths vision of liberation through technology from some of the physical constraints of traditional archival records, what has emerged in this new electronic environment is a digital domain with orphans of archivists own creation. What have been liberated through technology in the 21st century are archival principles.

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Theory into practice How those managing photographic archives have moved so far from archival principles is important to touch on briey, through looking at the intellectual anchors of the profession (Rastas 1992). Whilst Eastwood writes that the original purpose of an archive is forever part of its meaning (Eastwood 1992, p. 73), seminal texts on archival management have perpetuated the idea that archival photographs are somehow different from other forms of archival documents. For example, Schellenberg wrote in 1965 that information on the provenance of pictorial records in some government agency, corporate body or person is relatively unimportant, for such records do not derive much of their meaning from organizational origins ... Information on the functional origins of pictorial records is also relatively unimportant (Schellenberg 1965, p. 325). That Schellenberg saw this particular archival format as having different documentary requirements for the preservation of evidence and meaning from other formats is evidence of the primacy of the culture of text amongst archivists. Specic texts relating to the administration of photographic collections focus on an understanding of the form of photography as the physical object. For example, as Schwartz notes of William Learys 1985 RAMP study, believing that the photographic negative is the truest record of the information captured by the camera shifts the emphasis to uniqueness rather than purpose, to content rather than what is being communicated (Schwartz 1996, p. 46). For over 20 years, the Society of American Archivists 1984 manual for the administration of photographic archives primary focus was on photographs that have documentary value as historical resource materials (Ritzenthaler et al. 1984, p. 7), though the authors acknowledged that archivists must become visually literate. While the authors argued somewhat simply that this literacy can be acquired in part by looking at many images and evaluating their informational content as well as their technical quality (Ritzenthaler et al. 1984, p. 8), understanding the origins of and preserving the evidential values through the preservation of the context and structure of organisations is not part of the advice. Neither does this advice appear in Australian or Canadian manuals for management of government photographic archives (Queensland. Department of Public Works and Housing undated; National Archives of Canada 1993). These manuals focus on the photograph as a physical object, and it is important to acknowledge that materiality is in itself an important factor in understanding photographic meaning and the histories of objects (Edwards and Hart 2004), and a pre-requisite to understanding the preservation requirements of the photographic object. However, in writing that photographs must be analysed to test the truth and accuracy of their content, as must all historical records (Ritzenthaler and Vogt-OConnor 2006, p. 8), the 2006 edition of the Society of American Archivists manual has yet to be consistent in bringing a complex understanding of what it is which makes up photographic meaning to a general archival audience, yet it introduces archival principles to the appraisal, acquisition and documentation of photographs (Ritzenthaler and Vogt-OConnor 2006). As has been argued already, a photograph is more than simply a visual image or an object, and therefore its preservation entails more than understanding how to preserve the item and its content using chemistry. Preservation of photographs needs to move towards an understanding that this also involves preserving the sources of photographic meaning, through arrangement and description. In similar ways to understanding the essence of electronic records, it is necessary to develop ways to understand, document and preserve the recordness of photographs, which includes tangible and intangible sources of photographic meaning.

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At the beginning of the 21st century, archival thinking is on a cusp of potentially radical change. Far from new technologies creating a world where archivists can focus on the intellectual processes of professional practice, the advent of electronic records has the potential to stimulate archivists to rethink some fundamental tenets of archival theory. With the myths of the simplicity of the format-neutral world beginning to unravel, archivists can now grasp the complexities of debates about form and practice that new formats, in particular electronic records, are stimulating. Ultimately, the advent of the special format of electronic records has the potential nally to eradicate the pestilence of the traditional format-neutral stance from archival thinking and practice. This will enable a fundamental cultural and conceptual maturity in thinking towards the development and incorporation of format specic theories to accommodate the complex and multivariate formats in archival custody in archival education. In turn this should lead to building a more stable set of practices to ensure the preservation of the many special formats in archival custody. When looking at the future education needs of the profession a decade ago, Nesmith wrote that to ask what archivists need to know is to ask the wrong question. He argued that it is better to ask How should an archivist think in the next century? (Nesmith 1996, p. 92). Looking down the road of archival formats in the 21st century, this new archival frame of mind can be identied as a shift from a 20th-century knowing to a 21stcentury thinking.2 In order to stimulate the debate about the relevance of the presumed format-neutral approach in archival thinking, it is appropriate that Schwartz asks how much longer can we reasonably expect to presume that principles and procedures based on textual models and bibliographic approaches can be applied with impunity to visual materials? (Schwartz 2004, p. 109). The intensity of debates about one specic format provides the opportunity to move from a focus on archival process, to a new thinking about archival forms and in doing so change from a simple understanding of form to introducing a new pattern of thinking that all archival formats are equally complex. In identifying the need to shift from post-modern theory to archival performance, Schwartz brings diplomatic and photographic theory together to demonstrate the archival values of one specic formof photographs. She argues that archival institutional practices will change when there are fundamental changes in the way that photographic sources are understood. She sees this will occur when archivists recognize that archival value in photographs resides in the inter-relationship between photographs and the creating structures, animating functions, programmes and information technology that created them. It is for this very reason that we must preserve the functional context which transforms photographic images into photographic documents (Schwartz 1996, p. 50). The question for archival educators and practitioners is how to ensure that the cultural and conceptual advances occur towards thinking about, understanding, and of course, valuing format specialties along with the inherent recordness of all archival formats. In order to realise this shift, archivists will need to read outside their own literature, and glean ideas from beyond the narrow disciplinary shaft of archival science. As Cox argues

It could be argued that the shift from knowing to thinking has already begun with the publication of Archives: recordkeeping in society. Whilst this is a milestone publication which opens up whole new ways of introducing archival practices and institutions to a wide audience, this book retains a focus on thinking independent of format.

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archivists and other records professionals must read and work outside of their own elds in order to be able to learn from other disciplines which might have something to offer about the understanding of records and recordkeeping systems (Cox 2000, p. 3). What becomes clear when reading outside the professional literature of archival science is that there is a large wellspring of thinking on which to draw which will enable the adoption of sound format-based theoretical approaches to materials to replace the current presumed format-neutral archival understanding of the practices (Harley 1989; Edwards 2001; Lubar and Kingery 1993). Much of this format theory can easily be related to archival understandings of specic formats, which can then be translated into developing solid cognitive and arrangement and description frameworks. As well as looking to theory and practice of scholars with deep understanding of specic formats, archivists can look outside these spaces and learn from a range of disciplines which use archival materials. Through building a new convergence with disciplines which understand a range of archival formats beyond their use as illustrations, it is possible to stimulate work which highlights the evidential values of photographs and other archival formats. That is, archivists can learn much more about the forms and potential of the materials in archival custody by looking outside their own walls, and likewise they can stimulate the research once the complexities of the forms of materials in archival custody are understood and documented accordingly. The inclusion of these format specic ideas into the education and practice of archivists is a longer-term project which requires new texts to relate a thorough theoretical understanding of format specic complexities to fundamental archival principles. Equally, the specic nature and needs of each format must remain materially led even when there are institutionally specic decisions relating to documentation, management and preservation. For this to be successful, contemporary theories about formats need to be translated into comprehensible concepts and language, and their practical application demonstrated in accessible ways to a broad audience of practitioners. These texts can demonstrate the nature of the forms of material, how they should be managed to preserve the innate qualities of these archival formats and to preserve the intellectual relationships between the forms of material which provide the mosaic of archival meaning, and also how they can potentially be used as research evidence. Through this, a new generation of format specic and format sensitive advice for the management of special formats of archival materials can be developed.3 In returning to Nesmiths prescient question as to how 21st-century archivists should think, it can be argued that the traditional format-neutral approach to the management of archival materials has not served specic formats well. However, the emergence of electronic records has the potential to stimulate renewed thinking on the idea of specic needs of different formats. One option for moving archival thinking forward is to assess how contemporary ideas about the specic needs of electronic records t against the needs of older formats. However, while this may appear the simplest approach, this thinking is similar to applying the current thinking devised for text, to all other archival formats since the 1500s, and which has, as already discussed in this paper, been roundly criticised by
3

While this is a format-based proposal, the management of archival materials occurs within uid institutional contexts. Debates about which professioncurators, archivists or librariansmanage and make available material, sidesteps the fundamental need to understand material forms independent of whether they are held in a museum, library, archive or art gallery. (For an example of these debates see 21st-century curatorship: an invitational meeting of Library, Museum and Information professionals www.nypl.org/ research/curator/background.html. Cited 4th April 2006. Organization site.

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photographic archivists as being inappropriate. A more useful approach may be to build a new culture within the archival profession. This culture would acknowledge that all formats in archival custody have specic needs which require specialist knowledge. These new specialists would be educated and trained using a new range of texts which build format specic understandings of archival material, their research potential and their requirements to preserve their recordness. This approach may be embedded into our professional culture through creating an understanding that, like the new archival format of electronic records, all archival formats require specialist knowledge and skills. From this foundation, an approach which highlights the primacy of the needs of the materials, and which is developed during the education of recordkeepers, may lead to long-lasting cultural change within the profession. Reecting back on the archival world in the early part of the 21st century from a future vantage point, the realisation of the archivists role in the loss of archival principles in the world of digitisation, and the obsessions with electronic records, will have resulted in enriched debates and complex thinking about the nature of all archival formats. Emerging from this second-generation thinking is a bigger picture of the mutability of the fundamental archival principles, and the concomitant need for a broader set of format specic theories. Future archivists looking back at the early 21st century will see the emergence of a new professional culture that has begun to value the complexities of the range of archival formats and now incorporates a sound theoretical understanding of these formats alongside archival principles into everyday thinking about and managing specic formats. From this vantage point of reection, it can be seen that understanding both the archival needs and the research potential of the material has begun to mature. The emergence of a new professional culture of format specialists within archival institutions has developed, and in building on the understandings of the recordness of specic formats, they have taken up the challenges and the opportunities identied by Nesmith in the late 20th century to harness technology to widen public understanding of archives. References
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Author Biography
Dr. Joanna Sassoon is currently seconded to Edith Cowan University as Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer and Information Science. Her permanent position is in the State Records Ofce of Western Australia. She has long experience in managing archival collections, and has written extensively on a range of topics including digitisation, the effect of institutional practice on archival materials, environmental and indigenous history, and photographs as archives, and her work has been recognised with two Mander-Jones awards from the Australian Society of Archivists. She holds a Ph.D. in history with distinction from the University of Western Australia.

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