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Purposes almost infinitely varying: archives as sources for labour biography
Sir Hilary Jenkinson, sometime Deputy Keeper of the United Kingdom Public Record
Office, wrote in his Manual of Archive Administration about the two common
features of archives ‘of extraordinary value and importance’: Impartiality and
Authenticity. He referred to the purposes for creating archives and the purposes to
which they are put:
Drawn up for purposes almost infinitely varying – the administrative or
executive control of every species of human undertaking – [archives] are
potentially useful … for the information they can give on a range of subjects
totally different and equally wide … the only safe prediction concerning the
Research ends which Archives may be made to serve is that … these will not
be the purposes which were contemplated by the people by whom the
Archives were drawn up and preserved.1
That is, archives created for one purpose will invariably end up being used for another
purpose entirely. This is challenging for archivists tasked to decide what it is we keep
and what we let go: the fact that we need to predict future research use when not even
those creating the records know to what uses they will be put
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