Archives Tragic

Official records at the Australian War Memorial, 1945

Computers were blessedly unknown and catalogues not really necessary … Catalogues are all very well as a means of ordering up from forbidden regions books a reader needs for his research, but quite useless to a reader who has no means of guessing whether a book is relevant until he has looked inside its cover.
Russell Ward

[B]ut soon they set me up at a desk … and gave me the run of the place. No forms in triplicate, no searching indexes first: I could work quickly and look where I liked.
Bill Gammage

Russell Ward is writing of the National Library of Australia as he remembered it in 1953 when he worked there on The Australian legend. Bill Gammage was recalling the library at the Australian War Memorial in the mid-to late 1960s, when he undertook research for his book The broken years.

Both historians often found contact with staff more important for their research than catalogues. “Readers were so few and librarians so relaxed that before long they became friends”, Ward recalled. Pauline Fanning, Harold White and others would show him material they thought might help, and gave him the run of the shelves. At the Memorial, Bruce Harding, Vera Blackburn, Bill Sweeting or Geoff McKeown would “often stop by [Gammage’s] desk with something of interest”, a new diary just in, or even a cup of tea and slice of homemade cake.

The pioneering research that Ward and Gammage did was arduous. Those were the days when historians often had to slog their way through voluminous amounts of stuff, devising their own indexes as they went, and it was no wonder they relied so heavily on librarians’ and archivists’ personal knowledge. Ward read through all of Ferguson’s Bibliography of everything printed in Australia before 1845, looking for likely sources of early folk songs and ballads, but with little return. Tea and cake would indeed have been welcome.

And yet one prominent historian tells (privately) the story of his time as a novice researcher seeking access to the Australian War Memorial’s collections for his PhD thesis. He was interested in writing something about Gallipoli. Could he please see the AIF official war diaries? No, he was told. They are kept on the top shelf; it would be too much effort to retrieve them. Choose another topic. Thirty years later this researcher still felt the rebuff.

I only half believe that story but it does illustrate an important point. Many of us know what it is like to be flicked up and down by the sharp gaze of an archivist who is wondering if we will be worthy enough to be granted access to the archives’ treasures. The greasy-haired student with nose piercings finds obstructions in put her way while Professor Brainiac from Sandstone University sails right in. (Or so it feels.)

Digital technology changes all that. The boot is on the other foot. Greasy-Haired Student is in her element while Professor Brainiac flounders. Access can be instant and what a gloriously free feeling that is. More and more library catalogues are being exposed to Google, meaning that what seemed to be obscure turns out not to be. Even better, digitised content - books and archives, journals and audio-visual material - are being developed and delivered in a variety of ways.

Bizarrely, Russell Ward’s and Bill Gammage’s dream of open access without worrying about catalogues and indexes is coming true again. You don’t have to worry about hierarchies of information any more, or guessing at library subject classifications. “Just Google it”, we say to one another, and it takes you straight in.

Maybe. Whether it is ProQuest, serving the professional end of the market, or ancestry.com, at the amateur, there is often a cost. And here is a player in the an Australian niche market: Archive CD Books Australia. “Helping to preserve and disseminate our published heritage for today and future generations.” Rare, out of print books, especially reference books, directories, almanacs, gazettes and so on, are its specialty. They are sold on CD and if they are a bit pricey for an individual to buy, small libraries and local history collections are probably picking them up quite happily. But lots of little CDs distributed randomly about the place according to who can afford them is probably not taking us very far. Free, web-based content is better in the long-run and may the gods be with those people who maintain that as the vision.

The days of tea-and-cake research are over, and a good thing too. What remains are the tasks of the librarian/archivist: to acquire and arrange material and make it accessible in ways that preserve knowledge about the material and its context. And researchers? After every attention is paid to context and relationships between material - just slog through it. In whatever way we might be given “the run of the shelves” we still have to read what is on them. There is no other way.