Sir Hilary Jenkinson: The duties of the Archivist …. are primary and secondary. In the first place he has to take all possible precautions for the safeguarding of his Archives and for their custody…. Subject to the discharge of these duties he has in the second place to provide to the best of his ability for the needs of historians and other research workers. But the position of primary and secondary must not be reversed.

Archivists as Custodians The social challenge: limited transportation and communications; hierarchical and structured society The archival challenge: responsibility for the physical care and management of archival holdings; responsibility to provide in-person access to a privileged minority The result: access tools – including the walking finding aid – for use by researchers who know what they are seeking

Archivists as Interpreters The social challenge: political change, improved transportation, increasing social mobility, and the rise of the middle class, leading to the democratization of archives The archival challenge: to provide wider access The result: more elaborate descriptive tools, such as catalogues and indexes

Archivists as Exhibitors … Entertainers? The 21 st century challenge: the flexibility, speed, and pervasiveness of the Internet The archival challenge: to provide increased electronic access while protecting information, ensuring privacy, and addressing issues of confidentiality The result: archivists are providing electronic access to virtual representations of a vast array of archival materials; at the same time, archivists are more and more concerned with copyright, privacy, security

The pressures of the real world divert archivists from what “ought to be” to what “has to be” Which of Jenkinson’s priorities still stands?

The Eternal Quest for Money Funding for archival preservation and access influences the priorities of archivists and archival institutions Government grants can motivate, but how can archival institutions develop the sustainability needed to keep programs operational after the initial funding stream ends? What happens if an institution does not maintain its online finding aids and virtual exhibits? Sustainability of digital access tools is a significant concern

A Changing Legal Environment Privacy requirements and information legislation Copyright, privacy, and publicity rights How do restrictions inhibit access? Will users of online resources know if they are looking at selections? How will users find and use materials not available electronically?

Archives and Society What if the people identified in archival materials object to making information publicly available? In British Columbia, aboriginal communities are increasingly resisting efforts by the provincial museum and provincial archives to include images of First Nations groups on online databases, arguing that such images should not be publicly available without their explicit permission

What about the privacy not of records creators but of records users? Digitally accessible information resources such as online exhibits or archival databases don’t just help us find information; they also gather information about us, information which could be shared with us or with others.

Clifford Lynch: We’re confronting a new set of questions about what are we comfortable having public. There’s public and there’s really public. There’s a difference between things that are public for inspection if you go down to the courthouse and do a lot of digging around, as opposed to digital documents that pop up on Google when you’re killing time plugging people’s names into the search box. Clifford Lynch, “Digital Collections, Digital Libraries, and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information,” First Monday 7 (5), available electronically at

What are archival responsibilities in selecting materials to make accessible electronically? Should archivists emphasise records rarely found, to push the boundaries and increase understanding of the diversity and complexity of society? Should archivists focus attention on those materials that form the bulk of holdings, even if the result is stereotyping and pigeonholing aspects of society?

Clifford Lynch: We need to study the lines of demarcation between raw cultural heritage materials … and interpretation or teaching, or presentations of these materials. This is a boundary line that I don’t think we really have a very clear understanding of. It gets to the historic mission differences among museums, libraries and archives, and the growing confusion about those distinctions in the digital world; it involves the historical and perhaps changing roles of scholars, teachers, curators, and librarians. Clifford Lynch, “Digital Collections, Digital Libraries, and the Digitization of Cultural Heritage Information,” First Monday 7 (5), available electronically at

21 st Century Realities Archivists need to consider the long-term sustainability of access initiatives and other archival endeavours Creating virtual exhibits may offer short-term interest, entertainment, or awareness-raising, but how can archivists incorporate those efforts into a longer vision for increased access to information from and about holdings?

Archivists need to raise awareness of the legal and financial constraints on access programmes Archivists are increasingly aware of the need to be transparent in appraisal decisions; archivists also need to be transparent in decisions to digitize and provide online access to some resources and not others. The public needs to understand more not only about what archivists do but also about why and how they do it

Archivists need to acknowledge that access decisions are appraisal decisions In an Internet world, people increasingly think that if they can’t find it online, it doesn’t exist. Archivists need to let people know that records and information may in fact exist, but not in digitized form, and that a whole world of information and archives is still available outside of Google and Yahoo.

Custodians, Interpreters, Entertainers? A balancing act, but without the records there is nothing to interpret, no way to entertain …