Archives: Principles and Practices

Abstract

Since its publication in 2006, Caroline Williams’s Managing Archives: Foundations, Principles and Practice has been the first choice of textbook for most UK students wanting to gain a basic overview of archival practice. The recent appearance of Laura Millar’s book offers an alternative and although this review should not be read as an assessment of the relative merits of each, it is likely that many purchasers will be making this choice (and thus for budget reasons alone may well pick the earlier and cheaper publication). What would be gained from acquiring both? Millar’s book, one of the useful series of CILIP publications under the series editorship of Geoffrey Yeo, covers the ‘theoretical, philosophical, strategic, operational, political and logistical issues associated with archival management’— like the UK education programmes and Williams’s book, it is a ‘why-to’, not a ‘howto’. As a textbook it is engaging and thoughtfully written, with useful examples and insights born from wide experience. It will rightfully find a place on core reading lists and forms a useful starting point for anyone wanting to know more about archival practice as conventionally defined in the Anglophone West. Millar is perhaps best known to the UK audience for her Archivaria articles on memory and provenance which are theoretical in emphasis; here she aims at practical guidance, based on an assertion of archival ‘core principles’, basically those of the western Anglophone tradition. She is sympathetic to the notion that most of our practices are culturally constructed, emphasizing the importance of context to the understanding of archives, archival theory and archival practice. One of the book’s many strengths is that key concepts are historically and geographically located, associated with both background circumstances and the individual agency of the author by whom ideas have been articulated. Nevertheless, she suggests that professional ethics offer an identification of the core (i.e. permanent) principles of archival practice in any context and that following international standards is the means by which these principles may best be carried out. Her discussion of the principles may be nuanced, but it is never critical of the associated standards. In areas for which standards do not exist, all depends on circumstances, which the archivist is encouraged to identify and use to frame a mission for the individual repository, from which policies and strategies will follow. Journal of the Society of Archivists Vol. 33, No. 2, October 2012, 207–241