Current Projects
I am presently working on three major book projects.
Archival Anxiety. This is a book of cases where the societal roles of the archivist, both an ancient craftsmen and a modern professional, are seen as challenged and more complex. In the initial section of the book, I describe the nature of what makes one profess to be an archivist, exploring the nature of a professional calling and its importance as a mooring in the turbulent digital era where professionals seem endangered, experts suspect, careers expected to be always in flux, vocational knowledge possessing a short shelf life, educational venues varied and potentially more opportunistic, and even the certification of experts or expertise being transformed. Then I explore a series of complicated cases pushing archivists to reconsider their role in society, including the lack of interpretation of Colonial Williamsburg’s Secretary’s Office as an archives and what this suggests about the public perception of the archivist; the controversy about the reproduction of a political poster on the cover of an American Archivist issue offending some corporate archivists and generating an unexpected controversy now known as “Raisingate”; another controversy about the Society of American Archivists’ decision to destroy (ultimately rescinded) the archives of the Archives and Archivists listerserv due to legal and other issues and what this suggests about the present weaknesses of professional association leadership; government secrecy and its corrosive impact on the role of presidential libraries as both research facilities and museum and educational programs; a controversy about the National Archives’s decision to enter into secret agreements with federal agencies to close previously opened government records; a re-examination of what even a long-accepted archival device, the finding aid, reflects about the worldview and public perception of archivists; the need to rethink archival appraisal because of the new trends in personal information technologies, the emergence of new concepts such as digital curation and cyberscholarship, the demands of community activism and memory, the morass of intellectual property, and the ethical dimensions of archival practice -- all threatening to transform the archivist's role in society; and the challenges of teaching such unpleasant things to a new generation of archivists. Underlying all these case studies is my conviction of the growing importance of ethics in the archival community for all of its activities and the totality of its societal mission. This is a companion volume to an earlier book (2006) published about accountability, ethics, and recordkeeping. It is scheduled for publication in early 2011.
War, Memory, and the Archival Impulse. Our initial sense is to accept that war and its destruction is bad for cultural institutions such as archives, museums, and libraries. After all, these institutions are prominent symbols of particular communities and cultures and are often targeted for destruction by the enemies of these groups. Yet, war also generates the creation of archives, museums, libraries, monuments, and historic sites. In this contradiction may be found the critical elements for understanding why the archival impulse, the effort to save evidence and information documenting the past, is both so important to society and often difficult to understand. This brief monograph intends to explore the rich scholarly and other literature grapping with the meaning and impact of war and to consider what war suggests about archives and society. There is discussion about the meaning of war, the archival mission, war memorials and commemoration as archives, the preservation of personal papers and artifacts and the meaning of the fragility of war documentation, government and the making of official war archives, cemeteries as archives, terrorism and new challenges to remembering war, the future of archives in war and memory, the strange relationship between technology, war, and memory.
Lester J. Cappon, Pioneer Public Historian. Lester J. Cappon (1900-1981) was a leading historian, archivist, and documentary editor who played important roles in the shaping of all three fields in the mid-twentieth century. Cappon’s main contribution to the archival community was in his writing a series of important essays on archival theory and practice. Working with Cappon’s personal papers located at the College of William and Mary, I selected and republished his most important archival writings in a volume published by the Society of American Archivists in 2004. When I worked with Cappon’s personal papers I knew of his diaries and that they were closed until twenty years after his death (meaning they would open in August 2006). Knowing this, I determined to do a follow-up essay about Cappon as a diarist, assuming that an investigation of his diaries would provide interesting insights into the historian and archivist as a self-documenter and provide an interesting pre-digital case study building on my book-length statement published in 2008 about the importance and implications of personal archives in the digital era. Using Cappon’s diaries housed at the College of William and Mary’s Archives and Special Collections, along with several other important sets of archival documentation concerning Cappon’s life and career, I am expanding my study to consider his contributions to our understanding of the archival Impulse; the nature of diaries, the activities of the diarist, and the creation of records; his often pioneering teaching about archival work, historical research, and documentary editing; his career as an early public historian; his work as a documentary editor; his ideas about and activities in scholarly publishing; and his personal collecting and how this affected his own career.