Introduction

The aim of this chapter is straightforward – a thought experiment which will bring community archives and the records continuum into contact and then analyse the results. What is revealed about the processes of and thinking behind community archives when the conceptual framework of the records continuum is applied to it? What parallels emerge when we place these two ways of imagining archiving and recordkeeping side by side?

Before proceeding, of course we should ask if such an experiment has ever been done before.

At the University of Dundee, in December 2010, Terry Cook, the keynote speaker, presented one of his classic broad sweep surveys. It canvassed four professional mindsets that have dominated archival discourse during the 20th century: the first three can be summarised as evidence, memory and identity. Having allocated the records continuum model largely to the evidence paradigm, Cook ended by heralding a fourth emerging paradigm of ‘community’. In essence, he said that community concerned ‘participatory archiving’; it was about ‘a democratising of archives suitable for the social ethos, communication patterns, and community requirements of the digital age’, an age where ‘the activist archivist mentors collaborative evidence-and memory-making’. At different points labelling it a framework, a mindset and praxis, he wrote:

Our comparison will be narrower, but Cook's judgement carries weight and we will return to it at the end of the chapter.

The records continuum

It is time to consider our experiment's two inputs – the constant variables community archives and the records continuum model. Given the former is the focus of this entire volume, it is to the latter that we need to pay particular attention.

Commenting recently on the Netherlands archival profession, Eric Ketelaar noted that it had been professionalised very early.