Keynote Speaker: Terry Cook

Thursday 10 April 9.45–10.45

Terry Cook
  • University of Manitoba, Canada

Along the grain: assumptions and voices of archivists from the inside

Terry Cook will look at archives from the "inside," deliberately set as a companion piece to Verne Harris’s exploration of archives from the "outside." The "archive" singular, in almost all the recent (and very welcome) discussion across an impressive range of academic disciplines, is largely perceived as discourse, metaphor, symbol or manifestation of power, of human inscription and intentionality, of sites of contested memory. Almost no attention is paid to the real people (archivists) working in real institutions (archives - plural), all varying in time and place, with their own disciplinary and professional sets of assumptions, beliefs, theories, strategies, methodologies, and procedures that continually shape and re-shape the nature of archival record and the archives’ overall collections. Despite very impressive external theorizing on the "archive" (singular) in "outside" writing, what is still missing is the voice of the archivist, who is, after all, the principal actor in defining, choosing, constructing the archive that remains, and then representing and re-presenting that surviving archival trace to researchers. The story from the "inside" is a gradual transformation of the archivist from passive keeper or custodian guarding the past to active mediator self-consciously shaping society’s collective memory for purposes well beyond historical research.

Terry Cook has taught in the post-graduate Archival Studies Program at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, since 1998. From 1975 to 1998, he worked at the then Public/National Archives of Canada, leaving as the senior manager responsible for directing the appraisal and records disposition program for all media. There he conceived and implemented "macroappraisal" as a core activity. He is a former General Editor of Archivaria, as well as Editor of the Canadian Historical Association’s journal, Historical Papers, and its Historical Booklets series. He has offered lectures, institutes, and seminars in many countries on appraisal, electronic records, and archival theory generally, and has authored some eighty publications on a wide range of archival subjects that have now appeared on every continent and several in multiple translations. He is the author of The Archival Appraisal of Records Containing Personal Information: A RAMP Study With Guidelines (1991); co-editor of Archives, Records, and Power (2002); and co-editor of Imagining Archives: Essays and Reflections by Hugh A. Taylor (2003). He is now completing books on the history of the Public/National Archives of Canada and on documenting modern societies.

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