The end of archival ideas?

In May 2019, a well-known archival commentator posted on Twitter a message that questioned how it was possible that a ‘dude’ that they did not know could suggest that we had come to ‘the end of archival ideas’ and dismiss all the work done by the current wave of archival scholars. That tweet was retweeted several dozens of times by their followers. It was referring to a book chapter written by Craig Gauld, Lecturer in Archives and Information Studies at the University of Dundee, entitled ‘The End of Archival Ideas?’, part of the book Archival Futures edited by Caroline Brown. The author of the original tweet (which has since then been deleted) admitted in a later comment that they had not read the work they were commenting about. Most of their followers clearly had not read it either (none of their comments suggested that they had) and liked or retweeted the tweet on the basis of its author’s assumed authority in the archival field. Some of them suggested many names of people who they thought were living proofs that the archival field is flourishing with new thinkers and new ‘ideas’. The problemwith those tweets is not whether or not the authors they listed had come up with new ‘ideas’, but the fact that they rashly condemned Gauld’s argument without having read his paper and tried to understand what he meant by it. In fact, what happened on Twitter in May/June 2019 is a typical illustration of what Gauld was lamenting about in his chapter. Quoting cultural historian Neal Gabler, Gauld wrote that: