Philip Milnes-Smith, one of the contributors to the ARA SfNP Research Showcase, reflects on Jenkinsonian impartiality.
As part of the SfNP research showcase in April 2023, I presented a paper (on ‘[H]impartiality and Herstory’) looking at Jenkinson’s gendered use of language alongside a case study of archival silence drawn from my own freelance work. In this follow-up blog, however, I would like to reflect more broadly on the impact of the Public Records Office (PRO) mindset in Jenkinson’s Manual. Official records constitute archives that allow for only, at best, a partial glimpse of most of the population. As is noted in Theorising the Silences, “it is not just marginalised groups who do not appear in records. Most people do not feature much in them until the twentieth century.”
However, Jenkinson made it clear that twentieth century keepers accessioning accruals at the PRO had no business questioning decisions made upstream by the civil service, whether in terms of records that it would be helpful to posterity to have created, or of decisions about destruction for operational reasons that might be regretted. Subsequently, and more generally, being a (passive) keeper of what others deign to hand over seems to have continued to have more importance than actively collecting what will not be deposited through the ‘geological’ processes of the organisation. But, if, for example, women are still marginalised from holding decision-making positions within an organisation, then the papers will quite neutrally hand on male perspectives even if the majority of employees and product users were women. Low status, poorly paid roles such as cleaners or security and building maintenance staff may often be held by people with very different life experiences from senior leaders, but their potentially divergent organisational perspectives may not be reaching the archive. Similarly, the institutional archive of a tourist destination, a theatre, a college, or a hospital could, respectively, be unable to evidence the varied perspectives of visitors, audiences, students, and patients despite these groups being fundamental to their founding and existence. While our Code of Ethics mandates that keepers should “do everything within their power to avoid the destruction of documents that are of historical or public value”, they can only appraise what reaches them and that might not be very representative.
Given the extreme likelihood of a cataloguing backlog, and limited resources, archivists are disincentivised from adding to their own workloads. However, it is worth noting that our Code of Ethics explicitly uses as an example of a potential threat to our impartiality (along with personal prejudices and implicit biases) “the relative ease of obtaining documents from particular sources”. It also advises that “[m]embers should have regard to the extent to which their holdings and associated information are representative of the communities documented or affected by the archives and records in their care, taking particular account of under-represented and/or underdocumented groups.” The 2020 joint statement of intent for the Heritage Sector also explicitly commits to supporting members “to develop diverse collections”. For many this could present quite a change to existing practice. They might justifiably feel their archive qualification did not well prepare them to undertake it, and there is little guidance available. But if we keep doing what we are doing, we will keep getting what we are getting, and researchers will continue to want us to pull from our archive stores what was never deposited in them.
The New Archivist 