Introduction

Archival records need context in order to maintain their value. Indeed, value is rarely inherent. It needs to be excavated, lifted out, exposed and made explicit; and it needs to be shared widely to take its place in broader contexts in order to grow and create value in the collective. Conceptualisations of value in the archive are constantly changing and dynamic, and context and re-contextualisation – core to the work of archivists – underpins this.

Context is perhaps best understood as a series of questions, such as: What happened before? What happened after? What was happening at the same time? Who was involved? Where did things happen? When did things happen? Which, when all combined, might help to answer the question: Why did things happen? (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). Record systems and archival systems don't always make this collation of context possible, but continuum model thinking, incorporated by design into systems, with its emphasis on multiple purposes and values, potentially does. But not all records which have – or have the potential to bear – value as archives are waiting patiently in archival repositories for their value to be appreciated. With changing conceptions of value – and growing audiences for archival knowledge – unmanaged archival material, fragmentary in nature and sitting at and outside the boundary of the archive, is proving highly valuable.

Archival interventions

This chapter is written by archivists and historians from the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC, the Centre) to reflect on the value that we add or diminish by our archival interventions and the means by which (and reasons why) we work at the boundary of the archive. Critically, these reasons include the desire to situate the materials of the archive ‘in a contextual information framework that helps make them understandable to those without the deep lived experience of the field’ (McCarthy et al., forthcoming). The work of the ESRC, a post-custodial archival service based in a research environment and operating in the digital space, offers unique insights into the value of archives for the general public, as well as for specific communities. Situated originally within the University of Melbourne faculty structure, the group of archivists who had worked together as the Australian Science Archives Project moved into the library and academic services area on the transformation of the group into a research centre.