Two archival canons

ABSTRACT This paper compares and contrasts two very different strands within the archival canon: the archival science strand whose leading lights include Jenkinson, Schellenberg, Scott, Duranti, Bearman and Upward; and the post-modern strand initiated by the publication of Derrida’s Archive Fever and including Harris, Caswell and Cifor among its leading lights. The post-modern perspective has become the dominant research perspective in archival schools across the English speaking world. However a post-modernist theory of how records systems work has yet to emerge and thus there is no post-modernist approach to records management. For these reasons the archival science perspective continues to be important, particularly to institutional archives. The differences between the post-modern perspective and the archival science perspective are illustrated by comparing their attitudes to the thought of Sir Hilary Jenkinson. Jenkinson’s argument that archivists should neutrally preserve the records that an originating organisation had relied on to perform their most important tasks is inadmissible from a post-modern perspective, which requires an archivist to take a much more engaged approach. However the fact that reliable records are very much a ‘double-edged sword’ for an originating organisation means that Jenkinson’s idea of archival neutrality is not necessarily a regressive notion. This paper argues that the post-modern perspective is particularly useful for collecting archives, but that institutional archives will still need the understanding of how record systems work that comes with the archival science perspective.