I have hesitated to write this piece because, as I told the person who commissioned it, everything about the archive(s), archivists, and their tepid relationship with historians and humanities folk has already been said in academic articles, books, conferences, and in less diplomatic ways on social media. Perhaps the most succinct and well-presented perspective of archivy’s relationship with other academics is Caswell’s (2016) article, “ ’The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies.” I would not be offended if you stopped reading this right here and just clicked on the link to that article now.
Caswell (2016) acknowledges in her article previous work on the topic by Lingel (2013), “This is not an archive” , who spoke about the limits of the archives as a metaphor especially when the theories are constructed “in ignorance of archival work.” Recently, Gibbons (2020) has written “Derrida in the Archival Multiverse” which begins with the important point all of our voices have grown hoarse repeating, “Archival theory did not start (nor end) with Derrida.” As Eastwood (2017) explained, archivists themselves “have long engaged in characterizing the nature of archives.”
While inter-disciplinarity is deemed virtuous in academia, as I straddle the world of Library and Information Science and North African and Middle East Studies, I am often reminded of the opening lines of “The Bridge Poem” written by my former undergraduate poetry teacher, Kate Rushin (1981):
I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody…
Some recent works on archives by Islamic studies scholars have been painful to read and the cause of this pain is usually explained once one turns to the references and realizes that not one actual archivist or archival scholar was cited or apparently consulted.
The archivist–humanities scholar dynamic is a sensitive topic due to the (collapsing) nature of the academic job market. While librarians and archivists (who are different from each other and not necessarily interchangeable) are generally in the background, they often come to the forefront to be critiqued or to be told, “sorry to hurt your feelings,but a humanities PhD could do your job just as good as you, if not better.” Of course, I have seen multiple humanities PhD folk take positions in libraries and archives, but the best have been those who at some point also (condescended) to get a Masters in Library Science. As the Arabic proverb says, “It is the people of Mecca, who know best the paths and walkways of Mecca.”
Recently, I have seen some promising acknowledgements of “archival work” by humanities folk. In acknowledging archival “work,” let us be clear that this work entails, building knowledge and implementing archival theory. Archival labor includes a lot of thinking about context, subject matter, and carrying out research. It is not only the physical organizing of paper records or digital files. Archiving is “a form of correspondence” (Brothman (1993)), not just between generations, but between archivists and the users of archives. This could be better facilitated if those outside who write about archives (or “the archive”) familiarized themselves with archival literature. The following are good entry points:
- Archival Science Journal
- American Archivist Journal
- Archivaria Journal
- Gilliland, A. J., McKemmish, S., & Lau, A. J.(Eds.). (2016). Research in the archival multiverse Monash University Publishing.
Edited by and featuring some of the most respected and upcoming archival scholars, this volume, which was born out of research collaborations at the Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) shows the diversity of methods used and questions being posed within research in the field of Archival Science.
- Millar, L. A. (2017). Archives: principles and practices. Facet Publishing.
This is a good basic introduction to archives as documentary materials and institutional repositories. It discusses the relationship of archives with society as well as preservation and access issues.
- MacNeil, H., & Eastwood, T. (Eds.). (2017). Currents of archival thinking. ABC-CLIO.
This provides a window into recent thinking about archives on a diverse range of issues including appraisal, cultural heritage and social justice.
*https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/a/archivy
Sumayya Ahmed is an assistant professor in the Program of Library and Information Studies at University College London Qatar. She earned her PhD from the School of Information and Library Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States.