“The care of any archive,” Benjamin Bratton has observed, “is one present moment’s self-accounting toward an unknowable future.”
As a quondam historian of the social and policy sciences, I’ve spent my share of time in archives for research centers and Foundations. Some of them have been lousy — little more than a room full of disorganized boxes — like MIT’s archive for the Center for International Studies, located in a mildewing warehouse in Central Square. Others have been beautifully organized, like the Rockefeller Foundation’s archives, housed at Martha Baird Rockefeller’s spectacular former estate in Sleepy Hollow, New York (pictured below). The difference in what one can glean from a well organized archive versus a poorly organized one can hardly be overstated.
The Berggruen Institute, where I work, is coming up on its tenth anniversary. As we’ve been pulling together materials for a decennial roundup report, it’s become clear that the time has come for us to take a more strategic and focused approach to archiving. Like most other relatively young organizations that still have all the founders around, we’ve been primarily focused simply on getting up and running, and have spent scant time thinking about how to systematically document (and preserve the documents) of what it is we are doing. But now, a decade in, it’s time for us to start thinking more seriously about how we want to capture and memorialize our activities in a more fulsome manner.
As Bratton’s quote above suggests, any archiving strategy is necessarily embedded in assumptions about what the future may care about. Because preserving things has a resource cost — accessioning, cataloging, storing — every archives chooses to preserve some things and discard others. The things that get discarded are those that the creator of the archive thinks will be “of no interest” to people in the future (or perhaps would be embarrassing and should be suppressed). But of course, this is something of a fantasy: we in fact don’t know what people in the future may find particularly interesting about the present; our choices of what to preserve therefore mainly reflect presentist assumptions about what in the present will be interesting in the future.
To help think more carefully about what Berggruen’s archiving strategy should be, I had the pleasure this morning to spend 45 minutes Zooming with Bob Clark, the delightful Director of the Rockefeller Archive Center. The RAC was established in 1974 via the merger of four formerly separate Rockefeller family-affiliated archives (the Rockefeller Foundation itself, Rockefeller University, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Rockefeller family office). In 2008 RAC became its own separate foundation, and since then has grown in ambition to become the premier site for Foundation archives more broadly, acquiring the archives of, for example, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Knight Foundation. It’s both the lodestar and the gold standard for Foundation archiving best practices.
One of the topics we spent quite a bit of time on was how the transition from physical to digital records has transformed archiving strategies for Foundations. Bob explained that as organizations transitioned to mostly electronic records in the late 1990s and early aughts, they went through what he called “a decade of denial,” figuring that they could simply “hit save” and records would naturally be preserved. In the old days, the physicality of the production of paper created a natural process for records management and archiving. An executive would dictate a memo; a secretary would type that up on a piece of paper; that paper would go into a folder; and the folder went into a drawer. When the drawer got filled up, it went into a box. The box would then go to a records storage room, and when the storage room got filled up, all the boxes would be sent to the organization’s archive.
With the coming of the personal computing revolution and so-called paperless office, this physical process started to break down. Without any particular intention, a lot of organizations began to disband their internal records management and knowledge management capacity. Word processing programs meant that executives increasingly did their own typing and their own “filing” by hitting save. They lost their secretarial pool and downsized the administrative staff that previously had served as the organizational record keepers. Typically, it was only when the organization went through a change of senior leadership that it would realize that this loss of records management process had cratered the organization’s institutional memory. Suddenly nobody knew where anything was. This is the moment when organizations typically started to begin taking records management seriously again. According to Bob, the Ford Foundation has been particularly excellent in developing best practices around electronic records management and preservation. An effective records management process is in turn the cornerstone of an effective archiving strategy. The organization needs to develop and promulgate records management policies as well as appropriate and enforceable procedures for ensuring compliance.
Once we’ve got a properly codified records management approach, the next step for Berggruen will be to think about the process of transitioning records to the archive. Here, the first question we’ll need to ask is who the archive is for? Specifically, is the archive primarily for internal use, that is, to preserve institutional memory, or would we also like (at some point in the future) to make our archive public? These decisions will in turn drive answers to the questions of what we want to keep, and what we want to discard. Things we clearly want to keep include everything related to programmatic activities (publications and events), as well as strategy memos, board books, and budgets. Things we’ll want to discard include stuff like personnel records. More questionable are things like email, as well as WIP draft programmatic materials. (The historian in me has the instinct to keep everything, but of course that’s neither possible nor prudent.)
The other part of the conversation that was useful was the discussion about the readability of electronic records. One concern I have had is whether all of these digital records are actually going to be readable in, say 100 years? Will we have the software to read Wordperfect documents? Here Bob was generally reassuring that archivists are developing stable platforms for ensuring the continued readability of electronic records. More problematic, however, is the problem of linkrot in hypertexts. (This underscored for me that good old-fashioned footnotes remain worth writing down.)
In the end, every archive represents a partial snapshot of the thing it documents. ‘Partial’ not only because the total documentation that was originally created itself only captured a fragment of the rich real world, but also because of the biases of the people who put (and kept) things in the archives concerning what they thought would be interesting to future generations. The reason my instinct is to preserve as much as possible is because I have extreme epistemological humility about my ability to anticipate what the future may find interesting about the present. The truth is, we have no idea what, if anything, the future will care about. What we can be certain of, however, is that it won’t be identical to what we care about today.