HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 11 No.

4
© 1998 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) 17
[0952-6951(199811)11:4;17-32; 006604]

The making of memory: the

politics of archives, libraries
and museums in the
construction of national
consciousness
RICHARD HARVEY BROWN and
BETH DAVIS-BROWN

ABSTRACT
An archive is a repository - that is, a place or space in which materials
of historic interest or social significance are stored and ordered. A
national archive is the storing and ordering place of the collective
memory of that nation or people(s). This article provides a brief his-
torical/theoretical introduction to the politics of the archive in late capi-
talist societies and discusses this politics of memory via the performance
of ordinary daily activities of librarians and archivists.
Some relevant political/discursive questions include: who controls,
establishes and maintains the archive, and how do they do so? Which
materials are preserved in the archive and which are excluded? As the
documents and artifacts selected for the archive are ordered and classi-
fied, how do the schemas and structures applied include, exclude, fore-
ground or marginalize those materials? Finally, to what extent do the
logical hierarchies for classification and arrangement reflect social or
political hierarchies? Librarians and archivists face these concerns in

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their professional practice as they make decisions influenced by

budgets, finite amounts of both physical and computer storage space
and limited staff resources. The authors give real-life examples of
choices made as archivists struggle to balance ideological goals made
contradictory by practical constraints. For example, is it more appro-
priate to acquire as many materials as possible but be unable to describe,
preserve and present them adequately, or is it preferable to describe,
preserve and make fully available a more limited range of records and
documents?
Because of such practical concerns in modern technicist cultures, the
explicitly political who often is reduced to the technically instrumental
how - that is, political-moral questions are displaced to nonmoral and
nonpolitical technical discourse, thereby establishing a ’meta-politics’
that is understood only by the initiated. Conversely, archival activities
such as acquisition, classification and preservation are ’technical’ activi-
ties that may become explicitly ’political’. The article concludes that
technical activities always are political, at least latently or potentially,
even when they are not contested and made explicitly political.

Key words archives and libraries, cataloging and classification,

collection development, discourse, power/knowledge

The storing of collective memory must be as old as human communities,

although the earliest archives existed mainly in ceremonies, rites and the
sayings of elders. Only with the advent of writing, and hence the textual
embodiment of a shared memory exterior to particular minds and perform-
ances, can archives and libraries be thought of as specific spaces for storing
important documents. Such archives still might be moveable, as with the
Hebrew Ark of the Covenant that contained the sacred law; for where the
Ark was, there was the word of God. With the Romans, for whom both law
and script had a less hierophantic aura, the archive held legal documents.
Our concern here is with the modern archive, library and museum, especi-
ally in the United States. But what is modern about these institutions? In the
spheres of economics, politics and psychology in the West, modernity may
be characterized by the emergence of capitalism, the nation-state and psycho-
logical individuals. In the pre-modern West, most persons lived within
extended family systems that were subordinated to other lineage groups and
clans that together controlled the means of both production and violence,
that is, land and arms. As capitalism, and especially the factory system,
removed production from the household, it also separated work from family
and production from consumption. Commercial laws to facilitate trade and
employment between strangers also helped create legal, and legally more
equal, individuals. Protestantism also encouraged individualism by stressing

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each person’s direct relation with God. Nation-states emerged by taking

power from feudal lords and other enclaves of political autonomy, and con-

centrating it in a central administrative (and not merely personal) authority.

This new political authority, the state, monopolized not only the making of
laws that were to apply to everyone within its now inclusive territory, but
also the violence ultimately to enforce such laws. Little by little, the lord of
the manor, the king in his castle and the Lord God in Heaven, and the local
familistic communities which they protected and exploited, gave way to state
and market that governed the activities of economic, legal and psychological
individuals. Where formerly almost all of life’s activities were conducted in
familistic ways by persons with group-oriented selves, now life was divided
into public and private spheres. The public included the more impersonal,
rationalized state and market; the private included the family, which was now
much reduced in size and function. Moreover, as identifications with clan and
locale weakened, there emerged a more national identity, made up of indi-
viduals, to be sure, but individuals who defined themselves increasingly in
terms of a broadened, national community, however amorphous, abstract and

oxymoronic that concept may be.

These changes helped give rise to modern archives, libraries and museums
as places not of sacred tribal memory, but of secular national
memory. Family
and clan histories became overshadowed by History. As depositories of
national history and memory, modern archives, libraries and museums serve
several macro-social functions. First, they help to preserve a collective
national memory and thence to constitute a collective national identity,
thereby contributing to the conscience collective, the collective sense of moral
solidarity that Emile Durkheim recognized as vital to the smooth function-
ing of modern societies.
Today the ’present’ becomes the ’past’ with much greater rapidity than
before as rates of turnover, expansion and innovation of capitalism and its
technologies accelerate the rate of social change. Although many Americans
believe with Henry Ford that ’History is bunk’, social solidarities do require
a consciousness of shared experience over time, even if this collective
memory
is principally one of shared innovation and change. Archives, libraries and
museums help to shape and preserve a shared past and thereby contribute to
social stability and solidarity amid rapid and otherwise more centrifugal
change. For example, in Washington, DC the National Museum of American
History preserves and constitutes a shared ’American’ past as one of con-
tinuous human betterment through technological improvement. The Air and
Space Museum does this for more recent American experience. Both
museums are located at the symbolic heart of the United States, the National
Mall.
In the 19th century the central mission of archives, museums and libraries
was to preserve and transmit the received truths of tradition, even if these

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contradicted by an emerging academic scholarship. With the growth of

were
research universities and the rise of professional expertise in the late 1800s,
however, the guardianship of received knowledge gave way to an emphasis
on its creation, first in universities, later in libraries and museums as well.
Indeed, in recent decades objections to’’the politicization of culture’ are
voiced by conservatives who abhor efforts of archives and museums to
educate (and not only to edify) their publics. Because such institutions
depend on external funding, however, th~y must stay attuned to the expec-
tations of ’customers’ and to the demands not only of patrons, but also of
virtually any special interest group that can mobilize a significant volume of
editorials, votes, or dollars.
Thus archives, libraries and museums help to store and create modern
’imagihed communities’ (Anderson, 1991). Along with educational systems,
censuses, literature, maps, public monuments, Fourth of July ceremonies,
Olympic teams and other symbolic representations, archives and museums
construct the narratives of nationality, sometimes accompanied by violent
contestation. One example of this was an ’exhibit which shows that Hitler’s
regular soldiers committed atrocities alongside notorious units such as the SS.
This exhibit outraged many Germans who maintain that ordinary soldiers
fought only the enemy. About 1,400 radical rightists who opposed the exhibit
gathered in downtown Dresden, where the exhibit was held, while a counter-
demonstration picked up momentum in another part of the city (Washington
Post, 24 January 1998).
Since much history is inscribed in documents, narration of the nation-state
has been assigned largely to archives, libraries and museums of history.
Even in the United States, where most museums depended upon private
donors, history museums [are] more tikely to obtain direct tax support
from the national state, or the state governments. Museums of ’natural
’

history’ or ethnology play an even more fundamental part in creating

the cultural matrix on which the symbolic community is founded, since
they define the categories of the ’human’ as opposed to the ’nonhuman’.
(Zolberg, 1994: 11) 1

In this way they reinforce conceptual categories as to who and what are to
be included in or excluded from the notional memory.
Martin Heidegger (1967) noted that the arche of architecture had been rep-
resented by the temple and defined as a sanctum. But since the sanctum itself
was powerless and vulnerable and could always be violated, the treasures that
it both protected and yet could not protect came themselves to acquire the
appearance of invulnerability, veiled in mystery, containing the value above
’

all earthly values: the pure capacity to produce values. Now it was no longer
a matter of erecting the archive as a storage place for treasures.

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The building itself was to become a reflection of the unique treasure,

preserved and yet accessible outside its entrances: not only worth seeing
and thinking about, but worthy also of exciting moods in view of its
unshakability, worthy of graceful or sublime atmospheres, solemnly
glorious, playfully dance-like, or simply contemplative. (Bahr, 1994; see
Bloch, 1986: Ch. 38)
In approaching such an archive, one sees a large and impressive building,
usually with a broad staircase, at the top of which are heavy metal doors
which open on to an impressive atrium. You tacitly know what this vener-
able building is representing and what kind of institution and tradition it
stands for, especially in columned halls with busts or portraits of memorable
pillars of society. You notice epigraphs carved in stone, often inlaid with gold
leaf, or written in a classical language. Or perhaps it is a modern building that
sacrifices dignity for practicality. Whether classical or modern in shape, the
building obviously is more than its material substance. It also is a monument.
Beyond its functional purpose it reminds you that you are entering a
sanctum, a domain of being that is larger than yourself.
Surely the storage and display of documents and other artifacts is not mon-
opolized by the archive, and never has been. There have always been indi-
viduals who have spoken from outside such walls. But between these ’free’
intellectuals and the knowledge workers who claim the titles of curator,
archivist, librarian,or director that such institutions bestow, there runs a

symbolic and material border, a line that divides the orthodox representatives
of knowledge and memory from the non-orthodox and unauthorized
speakers. This distinction, this boundary between institutional and freelance
representatives, is but one instance of the power that is structured in and
through the official knowledge discourse of the archive. As we continue, we
encounter other signs and dimensions of power. Walking around and reading
the door-plates we realize that every activity is part of a department with its
own symbolic pyramid of titles, powers, rights and duties.
These are only a few of the innumerable elements that count in the defi-
nition of power relations in archives, libraries and museums, relations in
which members of the archive or museum community are involved whether
they like it or not. Of these, perhaps two types of game, or two types of
player, are most significant. Following Pierre Bourdieu (1984), they can be
distinguished according to which forms of capital are at stake in any given
game. On the one hand is the ’politician type’ of player, who in the first
instance is provided with and disposes of social and economic capital and uses
them as symbolic assets; on the other hand is the ’intellectual or professional
type’, whose primary resource and goal is cultural capital - knowledge, com-
petence and esteem by other experts. Given our observations so far, it should
be clear that power is part of everyday practice in archives. And this fact is

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unsurprising if we consider how professional life within the institutional

framework of archives, libraries and museums is organized to produce and
reproduce the subjects and objects of their specialized knowledge practices.
Thus the everyday life of archivists and curators is conducted within the
whole span of control and evasion of bureaucratic form and hierarchical
order, on the one hand, and of professional norms and peer competition and
evaluations on the other
Given this perspective, we may say that archives are the manufacturers of
memory and not merely the guardians of it. It is not that archivists do not
tell the whole truth about reality. It is that they cannot tell it. As soon as we
accept that any process of perception and representation is a process of con-
structing reality from a given observer’s social position and point of view,
then there are more potential truths than there is possible data ultimately to
confirm any of them. Thus each truth has a varying degree of intersubjective
validity and of public legitimacy, which is established or manufactured
through processes laden with power. One implication of this argument is that
the creation of collective memory through archives can no longer be seen
simply as a ’progress-of-reason’. At the least, when talking about the efforts
of archivists we have to keep in mind the struggles behind the scenery (and
outside the theatre) in establishing the reality, truth and acceptance of any
version of the collective memory.
As with most forms of modern social control, the power of archivists and
curators is embedded in technical-rational processes that are ostensibly non-

political. This technical-rational work is necessary to the maintenance and

even the very definition of a modern archive. In this sense it is far from being
a mere cover for ’essentially’ political processes. Nonetheless, technical-

rational decisions, though usually routinized and enacted on the micro-level,

do help shape the collective national public memory and, with this, people’s
shared conception of their origins, nature and destiny. In this basic sense,
archives, libraries and museums are political. And to the extent that these
political/discursive functions are unrecognized, the technical-rational
decisions and practices of archivists are ideological.
Our aim is to reveal this ideological or political dimension of micro-
processes of archival and curatorial work. We will describe a number of
central technical concerns or functions as these are understood by pro-
fessional librarians and archivists in the United States, and then discuss and
illustrate how they are revealed, when strongly challenged, to be also deploy-
ments of power. Some main areas of professional decision-making generally
are known as collection development, cataloging and classification, circu-

lation and access, budget and finance, and preservation and conservation.
Collections are allocated to different depositories, libraries, or archives in
the name of efficiency in avoiding redundancy. A division of labor, however,
also implies an allocation of control. In the United States, for example, the

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Library of Congress is accountable to the US Congress, whereas the National

Archives and Records Administration (henceforth NARA) is accountable to
the executive branch of government with mandates and responsibilities for
the retention of records.
One example of the political character of collection allocation is the records
(and especially the tapes) of the Nixon White House which Congress seized
in 1974 in order
...
keep the disgraced ex-president from destroying them. After
to

years of litigation, Nixon won a 1992 appeals court decision giving him
the right to be compensated for the fair value of the collection, a huge
array of 44 million items being kept at the National Archives high-tech
facility in College Park [Maryland]. Trial has been delayed by backstage
efforts to resolve the dispute with an agreement that would pay the
Nixon estate more than $26 million. (Lardner, 1998a)
Part of the money, $11 million by the most recent estimate, would be used
to build a Nixon library run by NARA as part of its presidential library

system. Although the case may be settled, prospects seem dim since the
assessment of value by the Justice Department is under $2 million, compared
with the $26 million settlement figure that has been proposed by Nixon’s
estate. As of February 1998, John H. Taylor, co-executor of the Nixon estate
and director of the Yorba Linda library, said: ’At this point, we are getting
ready to try the lawsuit’ (Lardner, 1998b).
Collection development refers to decisions concerning what is and what is
not collected, what is merely stored but not catalogued (and hence made intel-

lectually accessible), and what is thrown away. Such decisions are made every
day in major archives. Should one focus on canons and traditions, or strive for
diversity? Should archivists collect documents as amply as possible, or organ-
ize what they hold so that it will be more usable; for example, through digiti-
zation, which makes some collections accessible through computers? And
what, in any case, constitutes a ’canon’ or ’tradition’ other than the decision

to constitute through
one documentation? The personal papers of George
Washington certainly will be archived, but should the personal histories of
other families be held in the archive too? The Church of the Latter Day Saints
(the Mormons) maintains an archive of personal genealogies that probably
surpasses in completeness even the Nazi archives of family histories of Jews.
But should the family genealogies of ’private’ persons become part of ’public’
archives? And how is this to be decided? In the case of Mormons and Nazis,
the collecting was driven by ideological purposes, albeit very different ones.
Are there equivalent, but less visible, ideological components of such selec-
tion decisions by archivists in secular democratic states? For example, many
Americans may want to enhance the status of themselves and their kin by
having a family history made (or made up) and added to the collections of the

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Library of Congress. The Library does not accept such self-published items
for its collections, partly due to the sheer numbers received and lack of storage
space. This also is a question of mandate, of course; for example, the policies
of the Library of Congress are different in this regard from those of the Bib-
lioth6que nationale de France. This, of course, defers the power of exclusion
to publishers who generally have market criteria for selecting manuscripts for
publication. And even once published, materials are often not selected for the
Library’s permanent collections. But are market criteria appropriate for decid-
ing what will become officialized as part of the collective memory?
An example of these dilemmas, which always have an at least implicit
political dimension, is whether NARA should seek to retain all electronic
communications of the Clinton and future administrations or should compile
only printed materials. And within the category of printed material, further
distinctions can be drawn. Michael Miller, project director of the Electronic
Records Work Group at NARA, put it directly: ’We have to figure a way to
make it relatively simple for people to keep the good stuff and get rid of the
trash.’ Miller’s job would be difficult under normal circumstances, because
NARA currently has roughly 100,000 computerized files, much of it
unprocessed. Yet the archive anticipates receiving at least 8 million more -
perhaps even 16 million to 24 million electronic messages - at the end of the
Clinton administration. Moreover, electronic records are easily deleted, are
stored on unstable media and are accessed via constantly evolving hardware
and software platforms. Technical aspects of the preservation of electronic
records on such a scale are just now beginning to be seriously considered by
libraries and industry.
The Archivist of the United States, Governor John Carlin, initially thought
he had slowed the inundation of electronic records when he permitted agen-
cies to dispose of certain electronic records once a paper copy was made.
However, this sparked a suit filed in December 1995 by Public Citizen Inc.
and others to invalidate the order - known as General Records Schedule 20
-

because of a fear that records would be lost.

The suit argued that hard copies are not the equivalent and lose many
of the properties of electronic records, such as the electronic history of
earlier drafts. There would be no notes left and no clue of who had
added what to a document leading up to the final, cleaned-up version.
’The unique features of the electronic version of these records, which
make them particularly valuable for research, will be lost,’ said Michael
Tankersley, Public Citizen’s lawyer in the lawsuit.
Scott Armstrong, an author and journalist who frequents the
National Archives, was one of the plaintiffs in the case. He argues that
destroying the electronic versions of documents makes it more difficult
to retrieve and search the documents he seeks. ’Electronic information

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is different than the hard copy,’ Armstrong said.... ’You have data
which gives the history of the document. Printing it out isn’t good
enough.’ [For example,] upon the departure of President Ronald
Reagan and the beginning of the Bush administration in January 1989,
the National Archives was going to destroy the electronic mail from the
Reagan administration, despite the fact that the electronic mail ’recon-
structed much of the Iran-contra affair,’ tracing who said what to
whom. (Joyce, 1998)

Thus NARA says that if it is important it will be preserved on paper, whereas

its critics insist that people destroy what is important for them to hide.
Cataloging and classification refer to the organizational and intellectual
description of what is held. Whose schema will be used? Structuralists have
shown that a logical categorical order easily becomes a social and moral hier-
archy : culture-nature, right-left, male-female, white-black. Of course, pro-
fessional archivists say that their classifications emerge from the inherent
order of the material itself, much as naturalists say that their taxonomies do
(Ritvo, 1997). But the old-fashioned taxonomies changed radically under the
influences of cellular biology and Darwinian evolutionism, and may change
again in light of genetic theory and methods. Thus, classifications never
emerge solely from the material to be classified since our ways of defining the
material itself are shaped by the dominant intellectual or political paradigms
through which we view it. The current Library of Congress Classification
Schedule began in 1897, and Library documentation readily admits that ’the
original organization of the classification was according to broad disciplines
as seen a century ago. Since interdisciplinary topics were difficult to

accommodate in this system, many arbitrary choices have been made over the
years’ (’Subject Cataloging Manual’, 1998). Insofar as categorical systems
appear to organize their relevant reality ’correctly’, their ideological func-
tions are thereby more disguised and, hence, all the more powerful. For
example, the fact that male/female does usually correspond to certain physi-
cal attributes of men and women tends to mask the fact that gender stereo-
types are not physical facts of nature (like having a penis or a vagina), but
rather are political artifacts and hence not ’natural’ at all. Similarly, pheno-
typical differences between members of a population may help to ’prove’ the
’empirical validity’ of ’racial’ distinctions and, thence, of political domi-
nation. Yet, as with the naturalization of cultural categories such as gender,
certain physically evident features of persons may mask the ideological char-
acter of the ’racial’ classification. Similarly, with archives, libraries and
museums, political choices have to be made about allocating resources to
keep up with new paradigms by reclassifying older material, or to invest in
gathering new material to be classified according to the older system. New
paradigms or new materials?

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In the Library of Congress Classification schedule, for example, scholars

of dance have complained about the current categorization of ’dance’ in class
GV with the subgroup entitled ’Recreation. Leisure’ in the broader class G
of ’Geography. Anthropology. Recreation’ (’Library of Congress Classifi-
cation Outline’, 1998). They would prefer that dance be categorized in ’Fine
Arts’ under class N, as class G ascribes invidious meaning and lesser status
to dance, dancers and teachers of dance. Are professors in the dance
depart-
ment pushed, so to speak, towards the jocks and away from the literati? Cat-
egorical orders also change over time. What was formerly classified under
’conservation’ is now subsumed under ’ecology’ or ’environment’, probably
in response to the environmental movement as much as to the increase in
writings that are explicitly environmental or ecological in character (Brulle,
1994). More broadly, cataloguers generally respond to books that publishers
send in, and occasionally some books or a series of books trigger a reformu-
lation of categories or even a new category. For example, when a book on the
’mole people’ of New York City was received for cataloging, existing Library
of Congress subject headings which most closely described it were ’Home-
less persons’ and ’Railroad tunnels’ (see Toth, 1993). The cataloger requested
the Cataloging Policy and Support Office to establish a new thesaurus term
which expressed the concept of ’Underground homeless persons’. The
approval and recognition of this new thesaurus term in effect created a cat-
egory for this group of people, serving to officialize the identity and status
of mole people and render their plight more publicly visible. Since primarily
published materials are selected and cataloged by libraries, many items may
escape collection and classification, such as those by underground or anti-
establishment groups. Thereby excluded might be the samizdats of Soviet dis-
sidents and the faxes of Sub-Commandante Marcos.
Circulation and access refers to decisions about who gets to see what, and
this is shaped in part by the classification system or categorical order. The
Vatican Museum, for example, has what is reputed to be the world’s finest
collection of sexually explicit art. But, because it is labeled ’pornography’ and
hence antithetic to Church dogma, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for
the public to access. Rare books in libraries are treated somewhat similarly,
though for reasons of physical protection of the artifact rather than moral
protection of the reader. Here we can distinguish physical and intellectual
access. Many highly delicate or irreplaceable materials are not accessible

physically but may be accessed intellectually via surrogates such as photo-

copies, microfilm, or digital images. Access also can be restricted by govern-
ment edict as was much of the archive of Richard Nixon until Bill Clinton
ordered it to be made public in 1995. Many of the papers, like those dealing
with illegal or unappealing White House activities, ’had little relation to
national security even though they had been kept secret under that rubric’
(Lardner, 1998b: A6).

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Accessibility also involves the preparation of materials in certain ways. In

this sense archives, libraries and museums are not merely depositories - they
do not simply take in masses of materials for storage. Instead, to archive
means to classify and organize such materials in large part for accessibility.
Given that the scarcity of resources of archives requires decisions concern-
ing their allocation, a ’democratic’ approach to collecting (take everything in)
is in tension with a ’democratic’ approach to archiving (organize the collec-
tion for maximum accessibility), insofar as a greater volume and diversity of
input renders its organization for accessibility all the more difficult and
expensive. One example of the politics of access is when officials of the union
that protects library workers (American Federation of Government Employ-
ees Council 260) officially stated that they would oppose construction of a

government-run library in Yorba Linda and would demonstrate that shifting

Nixon’s records there would ’curtail and delay access’ to the roughly 80 per
cent of Nixon’s records that remain unprocessed more than 23 years after

Congress ordered them confiscated (Lardner, 1998b: A6).

A further example of the politics of access is provided by the controversy
surrounding the invitation extended to Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Pales-
tine Liberation Organization, to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum.
Miles Lerman is the Chair of the Holocaust Memorial’s Council, a
Holocaust survivor himself, and a leader in the campaign to establish
the museum. Lerman said he first learned of a potential Arafat visit ...
when he had an ’informal conversation’ with State Department deputy
Mideast envoy Aaron Miller, who is also a member of the museum’s
council. Miller suggested Arafat be given a VIP tour of the museum’s
permanent exhibition on the destruction of European Jewry by Nazi
Germany. Miller and his boss, envoy Dennis Ross, saw the visit as an
opportunity for Arafat to become the first major Arab leader to visit
the museum and thereby acknowledge the Holocaust and its role in
defining the identity and aspirations of Jews today. Walter Reich, a psy-
chiatrist, the son of survivors, and the second Director of the Holocaust
Memorial protested that such a visit would offend Jews who consider
Arafat a sponsor of terrorism. Reich also argued that the museum
would be seen as condoning antisemitic propaganda in the Palestinian
press. Under pressure, the museum reversed its initial invitation, a snub
which provoked renewed pressure from the Clinton administration.
This, combined with public reaction heavily favoring an Arafat visit, led
Miles to reverse his initial disinvitation in the hope that Arafat’s visit
may even make a microscopic difference in advancing peace. (Dam-
rosch, 1998)
Walter Reich was forced to resign.

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Access includes not only which living persons may enter the library or
museum, but which dead ones may be memorialized there. This is because
the inclusion or exclusion of exhibits or displays in libraries and archives can
seem to signal official approval to the public. After an exhibit on Freud and

his legacy was removed from the Library of Congress exhibition calendar in
1994, press reports suggested that the exhibit had been blocked by pressure
from certain anti-Freudians and feminists who argued that the event, even if
critical of Freud, would ennoble his erroneous and phallocentric theories by
providing them with a reputable venue. James Billington, Librarian of Con-
gress, addressed this point in a 1996 press release that announced the
rescheduled opening of ’Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture’. ’This post-
ponement’, he said, ’has been erroneously characterized in the media either
as a cancellation or a response to outside controversy over the show’s content.
It was, in fact, nothing more than a postponement due to inadequate funding’
(LCIB, 1996).
Budget and financial issues not only are means for allocating resources to
various units and functions within an organization; they also are instruments
for defining the character and activities of the organization itself. Govern-
ment-funded libraries and museums may have a conception of the general
public interest, but even this will likely vary according to which political
party is in power and hence who controls their budgets. This was displayed
by the controversy in 1992 over the proposed Enola Gay exhibit at the
National Air and Space Museum (Harwit, 1996). The curators wanted to
provide a broad historical context for an exhibit that centered on the Enola
Gay, a B-29 aircraft which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. They
intended to include in this context something of the Japanese perspective. The
plan of the curators was strenuously opposed by many members of the
Republican-dominated US Congress, as well as by groups such as the Ameri-
can Legion which wanted the exhibition to tell an unambiguous story of
American heroism with no relativizing historical or moral nuances. The con-
servatives in Congress, which controls the museum’s budget, largely tri-
umphed over the curators and their liberal allies. The initial plan for the show
was drastically modified, the canonical reading of that part of American

history was preserved, and the Director of the Air and Space Museum, the
scientist Martin Harwit, was fired.
Budgetary support from private corporations also comes with political or
market interests that affect the ways and directions in which technical and
professional expertise is applied. Corporate donors usually have different
and more focused interests than government sponsors, and they may be
insensitive to the technical or professional concerns and requirements of col-
lection management, cataloguing and the like. For example, many corpora-
tions are willing to provide funds in order to align their brand names with
’bankable stars’ of American history such as George Washington, Thomas

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Jefferson, or Abraham Lincoln. But it is likely that the papers, letters, or other
archived materials of such icons of the national memory have already been
thoroughly acquired, catalogued and presented publicly. Each choice to
recycle such material is a choice against making new information available to
the public.
By contrast, some private firms may wish to sponsor archival work and
exhibitions on a person or theme that relates closely to their own product or
service. For example, the AT&T Foundation funds archival work and Inter-
net dissemination for the papers of Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel F. B.
Morse at the Library of Congress (’Uniting a Nation’, 1998). Such activities

foreground the national historic importance of the inventor of the telephone

and, by implication, of the company that is the presumptive heir and bearer
of his legacy of unselfish public service.
Preservation and conservation of collections is a crucial function of
archives, libraries and museums. Insofar as the deposited materials are made
of paper and other media which degrade over time, an entire technology and
realm of expertise has emerged for protection, preservation and restoration.
The extreme case of such care is probably that lavished on the original Dec-
laration of Independence. Located in NARA’s shrine-like, neo-classical
building by the Capitol Mall, the Declaration is publicly visible through a
bullet-proof transparent casing, and is lowered each night (or in times of
threat) into a bomb-proof underground shelter. Texts and objects that are
considered less valuable receive correspondingly less sacral care, but the
degree of care itself marks and shapes the degree of value of its object. Selec-
tion for the archive, as discussed, is itself a guarantee of at least minimal care
that otherwise would likely be unavailable.
Sometimes, however, the perceived value of items in a collection can change
radically and suddenly, whereupon the degree and kind of care they receive
changes accordingly. For example, early in the 20th century the Victoria and
Albert Museum acquired 572 photographs by Atget, not because they were
beautiful works,

... but because the museum was building up an archive of decorative

ironwork and architectural details of Paris houses. You could say that
they bought them for the same reason that Atget made them, but they
didn’t record them as being by him. When Atget died in 1927, Julien
Levy and Berenice Abbott saved the contents of his studio from the
garbage, by paying $1,000 to the concierge. Forty years later, they sold
the collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was only
around that time [when the MoMA was redefining photography as high
art] that the V&A became aware of what it possessed. A similar story
is told about the exhibition of African Negro sculpture which MoMA
put on in 1935. They commissioned Walker Evans to photograph the

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whole thing. Sets of these photographs were distributed free to several

American institutions. The V&A reserved a set, and received the 477
unmounted photographs at a cost of $50

not as photographic art, but as mere documentation (Fenton, 1998: 44).

To summarize, archives, libraries and museums are social spaces in which
materials of historic or aesthetic interest are stored, presented and ordered.
A modern national archive is a place for the maintaining and, in some ways,
the creating of the collective memory of that nation as a people. We have
offered a brief historical and theoretical introduction to the politics of the
archive in late capitalist societies, especially the United States, by discussing
the enactment of politics by archivists and curators, and by their publics and
patrons, in terms of such ordinary daily activities as collection development,
cataloging and classification, circulation and access, budget allocation, and
preservation and conservation. We have also provided specific examples of
how such ’technical’ activities become explicitly ’political’; indeed, technical
activities, at least potentially, are always political, even when their saturation
with power remains passive.
We have also touched on some political/discursive questions. Who con-
trols, establishes and maintains the archive? What goes into it and what is
excluded, and how? How do the methods of selection and classification fore-
ground or marginalize various kinds of information and perspectives? To
what extent and by what processes do logical hierarchies become moral or
political hierarchies?
In modern technicist cultures, where rationality itself has a major legiti-
mating function, relations of power and domination often are masked by or
reduced to technically instrumental relations of efficiency; that is, moral and
political questions are displaced to nonmoral and nonpolitical technical or
professional discourse, thereby establishing a ’sub-politics’ that is available
only to the initiated - experts, their paymasters and, occasionally, critical
inquirers. This ’sub-politics’ is the normal professional practice of archivists,
librarians and curators. When strongly challenged, however, this technical-
rational practice is breached and its political character becomes more pub-
licly evident.
Many of our examples are of situations in which implicit political dimen-
sions of archiving became public and explicit. But such outbreaks of the
political are latent in all acts and phases of archiving insofar as the non-
controversial consensus that usually obtains at the technical level often has
been achieved through formerly explicit political struggle. The technical and
mainstream of today were the political and marginal of some time past and
may resume that status in the future. This should not be necessarily discour-
aging. The awareness of the importance of documents, or of the collective
memory, as social political constructions also betokens our ability to criticize

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ourselves and, thereby, to avoid self-destructive illusions, unmask mechan-

isms of oppression and strengthen our struggle to build a reflexive, demo-
cratic society.

University of Maryland, MD, USA

NOTE

1 The above three paragraphs are paraphrased from Brunner et al. (1999).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

RICHARD HARVEY BROWN is Professor in Sociology at the University of Mary-

land, College Park, and Affiliate Professor in the Department of Speech
Communication and in the programs of American Studies, Comparative
Literature, and Latin American Studies. He has written about discourses of
knowledge, as represented by his Structure, Consciousness, and History
(Cambridge, 1989); Society as Text (Chicago, 1987); A Poetic for Sociology
(Chicago, 1989); Social Science as Civic Discourse (Chicago, 1989); and
Toward a Democratic Science (Yale, 1998). He is currently writing on
relations between postmodern culture, global capitalism, and democratic
action.

Address: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park,

MD 20742, USA. [email: rbrown@bbsl.umd.edu]
BETH DAVIS-BROWN, MSLS, is Digital Conversion Project Coordinator at the
Law Library Congress for the National Digital Library Program. She has
of
managed technical projects in libraries since 1981, and she has worked at the
Library of Congress since 1991. She is experienced in articulating technical
and professional considerations to computer scientists, legislators, and other
constituencies, and has been a speaker and trainer at various national and
international conferences on interfaces between public and technical infor-
mation issues. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors only.

Address: Digital Conversion Project Coordinator, Law Library of Congress,

National Digital Library Program, Law/Public/NDLP (1325), Washington,
DC 20540-1325, USA. [email: bbro@loc.gov]

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