1) RE: “preservation”: Firstly, I intentionally avoided associating preservation with an archival institution or agency. I want to have a definition that includes all of the archival materials that are stored in personal (home) archives and in other ‘non-official’ archives. Nevertheless, a little further on I am planning to define archival institutions and differentiate them from personal archives and community archives as organizations that have a primary mandate to preserve and provide access to archival materials.

However, to keep the definition broad, I want to establish very minimal criteria for preservation. In my next post there’s a section called “Why Preservation is Relevant”, where I say:

“Preservation implies that the long-term value of the information object has been recognized and that steps, however minimal, have been taken to maintain and protect the information object. This is typically done by collecting and grouping related information objects together into an archival collection that is stored for safe-keeping in a designated storage container and repository, whether that is a shoebox in the attic or an acid-free box in a climate-controlled vault.”

So there should at least be some minimal intention to ‘maintain and protect’ as per the dictionary definition of preservation and some rough grouping together of related material.

Also, the concept of long-term is also not very useful in helping to define the scope of preservation now that we are dealing with digital information objects where long-term could be as short as 3-5 years. See, for example, Jeff Rothenberg’s oft-quoted, cynical observation that “digital information lasts forever—or five years, whichever comes first.” [Rothenberg, Jeff. Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Information. (RAND Corporation, 1999), p.3. Last accessed on January 30, 2007]

However, you’ve got a good point about the intention to provide access. Does storing pictures in a shoebox in the attic demonstrate an intention to provide access? It shows an intention to preserve…I have to think this through, thanks for raising it.

2) RE: U2 example
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You are totally right and I had hoped that no one would notice

I wanted to use a popular example and use something that had been published and sold. I guess I will have to clarify that example and say that it is a proxy for the event of recording and mixing the song. Notice that my definition of event above is fairly elastic:
“The term event is used broadly to mean any type of activity or occurrence that could range from a single transaction (e.g. the purchase of a magazine at a bookstore) to any number of inter-related acts (e.g. all the steps involved in ordering, paying, packaging and shipping magazines to a bookstore).”

This definition is elastic. It allows the concept of event to stretch and be hierarchical (i.e. consist of multiple sub-events, like laying down the drum track, laying down the guitar track, mixing the tracks, etc.).

In the end, when I access a copy of U2′s “I Will Follow” I am still dealing with archival material (in the scope of my little world here , i.e. an object carrying recorded information that has been preserved for my future use as a proxy to the past event of recording and mixing the tracks which were compiled as the song “I Will Follow” over a specific stretch of time sometime in 1980.

First, I’m good with your updated definition [“archival materials are objects in any form that record information which is preserved for future use as a memory aid or proxy for a past event.”]; and I like the proxy idea especially. It gives a succinct way to refer to the complicated relationship between the actions or events and the documentation of them. However, wouldn’t the definition need further qualification of the circumstances under which the preservation takes place? I’m thinking there could be many areas to explore here — for one, if you are truly going for a utilitarian definition in the context of access, wouldn’t you need to add some kind of qualification like ” … preserved for future use as a memory aid or proxy for a past event, by a person / agency charged with providing access blah blah.” Otherwise, if you don’t have something like this, the access-preservation link becomes implicit rather than explicit. Or, another possibility — what about materials preserved by the creating agency, but which will clearly never make it to an archives? I can definitely see how you would want to keep these included within your scope, on one hand; but, if you do, then there could be the question of what the “archival” in “archival materials” or “archival access systems” refers to.

And, second, here’s a puzzler: since your U2 example explicitly refers to a studio recording, what are the implications if they used multi-tracking in the recording process–which, in all likelihood, they did. In that case, it seems to me, that listeners are not actually getting a proxy to a particular event, as they would with a live recording in concert, because the version on the CD is actually created as a composite of several layers of recorded performances that were performed sequentially rather than simultaneously … yikes!

Just thought I’d stir the pot. I’ll continue reading the subsequent entries next week …

The Oxford Dictionary defines proxy as the “agency of substitute or deputy” Concise Oxford Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1951).

The Merriam-Websters’s Dictionary of Law defines proxy as “something serving to replace or substitute for another thing” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law (Merriam-Webster, 1996).

Archival materials can act as a ‘memory aid’ if a person is present at an original event by providing information that allows them to remember it. If the person was not present, archival materials can act as a proxy for the event by communicating information which allows the person to experience specific details or characteristics of the event.

For example, I was not present at U2′s performance of ‘I Will Follow’ in 1980 at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin, Ireland or the 1988 European Championship Final between Holland and The Soviet Union in Munich, Germany. However, I am fortunately able to access and use recordings (i.e. archival materials) that allow me to experience those events in proxy. As I explain in the next post, the fact that these recordings may have been copied, published and sold for wider distribution does not exclude them from the broad category of archival materials as I have defined them.

Of course, the proxy is only able to communicate a limited set of details and characteristics about the event. It is not the event itself. By listening to the recording of “I Will Follow” I can hear the music that was played on that day in the Dublin studio but I cannot see what the band members were wearing or smell the cigarettes they may have been smoking in between takes. To be clear, therefore, even if a person was present at a past event, archival materials will never be the actual event. They can only act as a memory aid or as a proxy for the event.*

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* Perhaps one exception to this rule is what Diplomatics calls ‘dispositive documents’ where the moment of an action and the moment of its documentation are “simultaneous and indistinguishable other than conceptually (for example, a sale takes place when and only when a contract of sale is completed), to the point that, in positive law, dispositive documents are actually called ‘acts’.” [Duranti, Luciana. Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science (Scarecrow Press, 1998), p.66]

Duranti is referring to the document and a very specific juridical act being one and the same. However, the actual event of drafting and signing the sale contract happened in a particular place, at a particular time. The participants in that event will have memories of the details and characteristics of that particular place and time which are far richer than the content, structure or context of the sale contract document can reveal.