Thinking Inside and Outside the Boxes: Archival Reference Services at the Turn of the Century

This article looks at reference service as a form of knowledge management that assists organizations and individuals in the knowledge creation and organizational learning processes. It proposes reorienting reference activities from an information provision or document delivery process to a knowledge creation process through an examination of four contexts in which reference archivists work: context of reference services, context of referees (or users), context of the records or primary sources, and context of reference personnel. One of the side effects of digital technology is that it makes those containers irrelevant. Books, CDs, filmstrips – whatever – don’t need to exist anymore to get ideas out. So whereas we thought we had been in the wine business, suddenly we realized we were in the container business. Archivists are in the container business, and the creation of appropriate containers continues to be a critical task for archivists. The containers archivists deal with are both physical and intellectual. The reference room, archival boxes, finding aids, and descriptive tools such as Encoded Archival Description (EAD) are all physical containers that structure and organize archival holdings as well as services. Archivists also supply intellectual containers by maintaining provenance and the evidential context of primary sources. Furthermore, archivists deal with issues of containment, such as those concerning privacy and security that restrict, or contain, the use of certain records. At the same time, archivists provide access to primary sources physically as Archival Reference Services at the Turn of the Century 141 well as intellectually through their policies, reference tools, and advocacy efforts. The importance of archival containers and managing containment, or access, persists and perhaps grows more significant in the digital environment. Digital technologies may even make the containers more critical if they incorporate means of maintaining an authentic context and essential evidence for records of enduring value. Digital technologies also make containment both harder and easier. Containment is harder because of the fluidity, or changeability, of these technological applications. Yet, digital technologies can also present possibilities for opening the containers in more powerful and diverse ways than ever before. Within all types of organizations, individuals are attempting to harness these technologies to take advantage of intellectual capital by using the techniques of “knowledge management” and “digital asset management.” Neither archival managers nor the users of archives automatically see archivists associated with these terms. By focussing more on the intellectual and physical aspects of containers and containment, archivists may become better equipped to make their unique, vital, and relevant contribution to diverse clienteles. This article argues that reference services should be seen as a part of knowledge management, assisting organizations and individuals in the knowledge creation and organizational learning processes. It asserts that, in order to assist users in this way, archivists should develop and maintain appropriate containers and types of containment (e.g., rules that govern access) so that diverse archival clienteles can effectively use records. In today’s world of knowledge workers and knowledge-creating organizations, can archivists still afford to be seen as curators of data and, simply, information providers? It is time to rethink the archivist’s role in providing service to a whole range of users – administrators, scholarly and recreational researchers, as well as other types of users – of primary sources. In doing this, we may need to reorient the reference function from simple information provision or document delivery to a process of knowledge. As archivists move in this direction, we must break out of our current mold as curators of data and explore the following issues of context: context of reference services; context of referees (or users); context of the records or primary sources; and the context of reference personnel. Archivaria readers may recognize some parallels between these four areas of context and the “transformations” in culture, records, computers, and the archivist discussed by Hugh Taylor in his 1987 article. This is intentional. The present article seeks to further some of Taylor’s arguments and revisit some of the changes he predicted and identified. Context of Reference Services “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men