Recently new archival material has been uncovered that sheds light on a previously unsubstantiated rumor. Mussolini-also known as Il Duce-was for a short period of time in the employment of British MI-5. According to Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.” The payments according to the Guardian were authorized by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI-5’s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy during this period. At the time, Mussolini ran a right-wing newspaper, the Il Popolo d’Italia, which made him an attractive “asset” to western intelligence agencies. Along with his “literary talents,” Mussolini had a penchant for giving political opponents “offers they couldn’t refuse,”  Mussolini made available to Hoare and MI-5, Italian army veterans who beat up peace protesters in Milan (a possible preview to his fascist black shirt units) as a way to enlist continued Italian support for the war.

While the above story is fascinating, with features of skullduggery and subterfuge, what really interests us are the story’s archival nuances. The context of this event, revolve around Cambridge historian Peter Martland and his discovery of payment references proving Hoare’s (and MI-5’s) complicity with Mussolini. But more than that is the fact that Hoare kept the references and mentioned it in his memoirs, published in 1954. Why the story never took off when it was first told decades ago is not known (no actual documentation?) but the largely ignored story  has obtained new life with the recent find in Hoare’s papers (except in Italy). The act of creating and keeping the references by Hoare is interesting in of itself because it proves that the operation followed some type of protocol and that Hoare was not freelancing, or so it would seem. Consequently, this operation possibly might have been known by higher-ups at MI-5 because if it was not, why would he have created and kept the references to the payoffs, for historical purposes…I doubt it. It more than likely seems that Hoare wanted to create a paper trail to either protect himself or the possibly more mundane act of just keeping good accounting records (go figure).

Another area of archival concern implied within the article is preservation. The question to pose about this event is, would Hoare have kept the records if they could have been disseminated electronically at the point of creation and would Martland have discovered them years later if they would have been created within an ephemeral electronic environment, especially one with an automated records destruction cycle? I don’t have the answers to these questions but they do hang over us like the Sword of Damocles. How do we preserve electronic records but more importantly can we get to records that can shape or change history? It would seem that the ability to create and store in an analog environment but more importantly to keep such documentation private are one of the attributes that make paper so inviting to the records creator. Would people be so quick to create documentation in a more widely accessible medium, if they believed it would incriminate them in nefarious activities or would such previously recorded acts move to a more “private recording sphere?”

One final point to discuss is the authenticity of the documents. Some people might question these records as fraudulent but I would contest those charges with a couple of points. First, why would Hoare have referred to the event in question in his memoirs, if it was not true and what possible advantage would certain personnel in British Intelligence have in admitting to being associated with a known thug? By 1944 being associated with fascism was seen unfavorably, after all this was not 1938 when Hitler was chosen as Time “Man of the Year,” when the world was still enamored with Fascism. So, I cannot see there being any reason for the fraud but one never completely knows.

This story did not end well for all of the characters involved, both protagonists, Mussolini and Hoare, would meet again but not before Mussolini had turned many of his Italian WWI veterans into the elite Black Shirt shock troops (MI-5 money helped) and used them to march on Rome. After taking control of Italy, Mussolini quickly turned his ambitions to recreating the Roman Empire which brought him back into contact with his old paymaster. It was under the auspices of the Abyssinia (which consists of modern day Ethiopia and Eritrea) conflict in which then British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Mussolini control over Abyssinia and sowed the seeds for the eventual war in Saharan Africa. As history tells us, Mussolini would end his conquering days swinging from the gallows, while Hoare would be made Peerage as Viscount Templewood, of Chelsea in the County of Middlesex after serving as ambassador to Spain during WWII.

Many times researchers, citizens and students are not aware of one of the most powerful tools available to them: the Freedom of Information Act. What are FOIA requests? The FOIA is a federal law (established in 1966) that establishes the public’s right to obtain information from federal government agencies. This law however excludes: the Congress, the federal courts, and parts of the Executive Office of the President that function solely to advise and assist the President (like the “Czars”). Now, before you go out and try to discover any skulduggery or think you may be the next Woodward and Bernstein, be sure that you follow all of the guidelines and know exactly what you are requesting. Be aware that FOIA’s are not free, individual agencies can charge for research and coping but fees are waived many times if you can prove that your endeavor is of a scholarly nature. Fortunately, the National Security Archive (read our previous website review of this informative site) has made jumping into the quagmire of government records requests much easier. The NSA has put together a on-line manual that guides the researcher step-by-step and helps them avoid the usual pitfalls of requesting anything from the government. I highly recommend it if one is willing to go down this arduous but  enriching research path.

Click here to go to the guide.

Many times when researchers are looking for primary sources they forget or have never heard of the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections.  As stated on their website, “the mission of the NUCMC program is to provide and promote bibliographic access to the nation’s documentary heritage. This mission is realized by NUCMC production of cataloging describing archival and manuscript collections held by eligible repositories located throughout the United States and its territories. The program’s mission is further realized by the provision of free searching, via NUCMC gateways, of archival and manuscript cataloging in OCLC WorldCat.” This often overlooked resource is a powerful tool that enables researchers to effectively reduce uncertainty and ambiguity, which should always be part of any research strategy.

Click here to go to the website.

What is Light the Wick? Light The Wick is a weekly glimpse at the goings-on along the art corridor (Wick Avenue) at Youngstown State University. This show is completely student produced and gives the world a glimpse at our community here at YSU.

See the latest episode of Light the Wick.

The finding aid (sometimes referred to as the representation of records) has remained the main staple of describing, controlling and arranging of archival collections for the last century.  Digitally the finding aid has migrated into the digital world through MARC, EAD, XML and DACS markup tools. This migration however was only to describe analog objects in a digital environment, it did not truly address the quandary of born digital objects. While new systems are being built around EAD models (Archives Tool Kit, ARCHON) the dilemma of vast quantities of homogeneous and unique series being transferred, accessioned, and described to the same level of current analog objects does not truly exist (there are exceptions, the Maryland and Washington State Archives being the best example of archives doing mass digital transfer and preservation). Where does that leave the finding aid (in its current state), does it have a home in the new born digital world or will it be replaced…. with the google search?

Before we continue, it behooves us to describe the function and structure of a finding aid. The finding aid serves two main objectives: it provides both administrative and intellectual control. The administrative control addresses several points: location, the record source, provenance, and general description. The intellectual control answers questions pertaining to researcher needs: detailed information about records within a series or record group (such as biographical information); information on unique information that may be found and the relationship with other records in the collection or repository holdings. The structure of most finding aids usually follows the record group topology: preface, introduction, biographical sketch or entity history, scope and content, series description, container and item listing. There are exceptions to this rule as most governmental archives follow a series or functional description structure (the Australian Records Continuum and Canadian Macro-Appraisal theories being the most popular). Regardless of what methodology one follows, a finding aid should meet several basic criteria: they should be written for general researchers; have a certain level of objectivity; they must be well written, succinct and concise; they must take into account the different subject areas that a collection (or series)  may address; and finally something that has not been implemented-the annotation of the archivist’s pedegogy and epistemology.¹

We have discussed what a finding aid does, now we will discuss the evolution of it. The five levels of arrangement: repository, record group (collection), series, file unit, and item were created by Oliver Wendell Holmes. But the anthropological evolution of archival representation and description go back to Archives Nationale and the Prussian State Archives (see previous blog on part of this discussion, Respect des Fonds and Original Order, breaking it and keeping it), their creation of the modern system of arrangement and registries had the most profound effect upon modern archives and consequentially the finding aid. The evolution continued with the founding of the National Archives (now known as the National Archives & Records Administration, or NARA) in the 1930’s, the (NARA) staff upon discovering the lack of records organization, decided to deal with the predicament by inventing a records management system to control the life cycle of records. But the real impetus for many of our current standards can be found in the Historical Records Survey and the organization of county court house records during the Depression. (For further discussion on this subject, see: Richard C. Brerner’s, Archival Theory and Practice in The United States.)

Philosophically, the finding aid is the hypostatisation of archival reification.² If archiving were an abstract object (collecting and describing the physical documentary temporal spatial environment) than its resultant physical creation or byproduct is the finding aid (the hypostatisation of archival reality (the reification).³ However, within the digital world the need for this changes dramatically, or does it? If the finding aid is the representation of  structures, epistemologies and ontologies within an analog environment, how does the digital structure change it? While we could take this argument and pursue how society itself is going to be changed and therefore documentary creation and collection (read previous blog: Archival Appraisal and Selection in the Information Society), instead I will focus my analysis to the final resultant (an attempt at a all encompassing analysis would be prohibitive).

So, returning back to my previous statement, “can a keyword (google like) search mechanism replace a finding aid?” This can lead us to many different tangents: pattern recognition, educational pedagogies, evolving societal structures, post-modernism (everything seems to be post-modernist now, see: Postmodernism and Logical Positivism in Archival Thought on the topic of post-modernism and archives) and so on. However, while keyword federated searching has its obvious strengths, it cannot possibly address the contextual, evidential and structural nature of unbounded finite interrelated items. The items within a records group, series or collection have the peculiar uniqueness of having both interconnected intrinsic and extrinsic substance and essence. Capturing a keyword (or any single meta data item) is very important for searching but it can never replace the macro-contextualization of information. Take the example of the Google book project; if Google were able to scan all of the books in the world and provide ocr’d searchable text, would we still need book cataloging? Many people out there would probably at first glance say no. But if we were to analyze this proposition further, we would deny ourselves valuable information that is only captured at the cataloging phase: the provenance, context, subject analysis, and many more areas to numerous to name (I’m sure catalogers could come up with a million).  However, the importance of the finding aid is even more critical to unpublished records.

The finding aid takes raw materials and contextualizes them. That contextualization describes the records provenance, history, structures, and external and internal relationships. Simply ocr’ing a text and making digital surrogates available, while incredibly useful for accessibility purposes, would not address those areas stated before. So, the question isn’t should the finding aid survive but what form will it take when records are no longer analog?  This will directly effect how the archivist analyzes data or digital forms on a server, optical disk or hard drive. We have stated the ontological importance of the finding aid. In the next blog we will go into the new areas of analysis that a finding aid must address in the new information age and further discuss the philosophical implications.

Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-30.

Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).

For further discussion on hypostatisation and reification, See: Georg Lukacs’s essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.”

With the amount of information being created it would seem that technology has only created more problems than it has solved. Now archivists have a plethora of information to analyze (but beyond the question of quantity, there is also the question of stability and ease of destruction) and more questions that seem to have no answers: new mediums of information, with criteria and categories that sometimes have no relation to the past? The belief that all appraisal is local and subjective,¹ without acknowledging the digital world breaking down previous spatial barriers?  Finally, post-modernism² points out that we are all prisoners of our subjectivity (or appearance)³ incapable from escaping the shadows in the cave, raising the specter of a totalitarian subjectivity. Regardless of the many questions that must be addressed, I believe a continued improvement of our archival causality will aid in overcoming the supposed subjective/objective (post-modernist) impasse.  In the mean time, all of these questions will be carried over into the new temporal and spatial contexts, with seemingly no answers. (I briefly touched on some of these points in a previous blog, History and Future of Archival Thought and Practice.)

At the heart of the new technological paradigm are still the same archival issues: what records (or data) describes our society, what mediums are people and entities using to convey their beliefs, needs and histories, and what means will we use to describe and arrange these new mediums. I don’t believe that we need to collect anything drastically different but we have to know how the new information topologies have created or altered content and we must document the process, intention, philosophy and subjectivity of documentary evidence.  Precedent will carry us forward and answer many of our selection and appraisal questions. It is not a-priori knowledge but a-posteriori that will be applied in many situations, we may believe we are recreating the wheel but in fact we really are borrowing and building upon previous pedagogies.⁴ But the most profound difference will lie in our ability to draw closer to archival causality.⁵ It is that search for causality or innate search for knowledge of the external world that will draw us towards better conclusions.

As Archivists we already have a-posteriori category knowledge (in other words many record series will be duplicated both for convenience and because of pattern recognition⁶) from our previous analog work but whatever form our selection and description takes us-it must be documented. It has been stated that we need to annotate our arrangement and description as a means to overcome the deficiency of subjective arrangement and description.⁷ I will take it one step further and declare that we need to annotate our appraisal and acquisition decisions as well.

Annotating our appraisal and selection decisions will give us greater insight into records and the systems that created them. With electronic records these annotations could describe how records were created (databases, HTML text, or on-line search engines). Another question that will need to be confronted is what are the functions of these systems and how do they lend themselves to the new records creating process. Also, documentation of why certain systems were used for retrieval and not others, will be significant. The how will not be as difficult as the why. The complexity of how, will be in the front-end costs of digital archiving and the specialized skills that are needed. This possibly will lead to increased cooperation among system creators,  (DSpace and Fedora are just two examples). But all of that will fail if we don’t answer the basic ontological and teleological questions and develop a more sophisticated systematic methodology of documentary causality.

One way to accomplish this important endeavor is to turn to the philosophy of science. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell (and his five causal postulates),⁸Aristotle’s Four Causes and Mario Bunge’s work in the causal⁹ field give archivists a good starting point for developing an improved causal rule set. By adopting a more sophisticated methodology, archivist’s will draw closer to relevant facts (documentary evidence and its relations) and improved decision making (better appraisal and selection). Some will argue that it is not feasible to apply rules from the empirical sciences to archival work, to some extent that may be true (even others will declare this is being done already when they answer the who, where, when, how and why of documents) but we can still improve our decision making process by having a formal set of rules to guide us. In my next blog on appraisal and selection, I will address its feasibility.

Mark A. Greene and Todd J. Daniels-Howel, “Documentation with an Attitude: A Pragmatist’s Guide to the Selection and Acquisition of Modern Business Records,” in The Records of American Business, ed. James M.O’Toole (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997), 162.

Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science, vol. 1, no. 1 (2000): 3-24.

H.A. Prichard, “Appearances and Reality,” Mind, Vol. 15, No. 58, (Apr., 1906): 223-229.

Linda J. Henry, “Schellenberg in Cyberspace,” American Archivist, Vol. 61, (Fall 1998): 309-327.

Not a simplistic causality (where the first is the cause of the next, usually associated with David Hume) but a more complex epistemology, more in line with Bertrand Russell’s Five Postulates of Causality. See, Human Knowledge.

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language: towns, buildings, construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Michelle Light and Tom Hyry, “Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid,” American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 216-30.

Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948).

Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science (New York: Dover Publications, 1979).

The Academic Senate is an import functioning body on campus made up of mostly faculty, but also students and members of the Administration. The function of the Senate is to establish new polices or to improve/change existing ones in order to ensure a better academic learning environment. Topologically the Academic senate is composed of several committees: Chartered, Ad hoc, Election and Balloting, and several miscellanous ones.

Chartered committees are appointed by the Executive Senate or through the Election and Balloting Committee and exist for a number of years. Ad hoc committees are temporary in nature and are formed on an as-needed basis. Finally, there are committees that are appointed by the President of the University. These are the Administrative Boards and Committees.

The records housed in Archives date back to 1952 when the Academic Senate was called the University Senate; however, some committees actually predate the existence of the Senate. For example, the Library Committee was established early in the history of Youngstown College, in 1937. The purpose of the committee then was to raise funds to build a new library (which was achieved in 1953 with the opening of Tod Hall, the library being housed in the attic of Jones Hall prior to that date).

The processing of this collection was a bit of a daunting task mainly because of the abundance of material and different types of media (over 90 cassette tapes had to be converted to CDs). By the time the physically process was finished, the collection consisted of 13 boxes (16.9 linear feet) and 8 smaller boxes of cassettes and CDs. The physical process took about two months. Digitizing the collection was the next task after physically processing it. The digitizing was more difficult and time consuming. We scanned each folder into one PDF, which meant that each folder had to be broken down into several PDFs by the item, because we determined that scanning the collection by folder was more productive. This also allowed us to use the document feeder on the scanners and break down the larger files into smaller files instead of scanning each page by hand and saving the page as a single PDF.  This process took about six months.

While working on this collection, it was interesting to see the lengths in which academic policies are determined, such as student grievance policies, and the process involved in the creation of new programs, such as the writing of new curricula, the establishment of the Labor Students Program, and the formation of graduate programs.  The Senate was also involved with the transition of the academic calendar from Quarters to Semesters. The Ad hoc committee was created specifically for that purpose. It is clear that this University could not be as successful or as organized without this governing body.

Click here to go to the collection.

In a past blog we discussed the possibility of newspapers disappearing as a information source (or at least as a analog source). While not all newspapers are being thrown a lifeline, there’s something about that old saying…  “what’s in a name.” The New York Times was all but assured of going the way of GM, when out of nowhere (south of the border actually) there arrived hope. The hope came in the shape of Mexican Carlos Slim Helu, considered one of the wealthiest men in the world, who controls (or owns it, depending on who you talk to) about 40-45% of the Mexican economy. Carlos Slim is viewed by some as a financial oligarch and by others as a source of pride. What ever may be the case, Slim is now the largest shareholder of the Times, after the Sulzbergers. What does this all mean? Who knows, maybe just like in the auto industry (Chrysler owned by Fiat, GM owned by the U.S.A Gov and Hummer owned by the Chinese) we will now start selling other “sacred institutions” to foreigners, governments or unions.  Or maybe, newspapers have gone the way of the Dodo. Whatever the final outcome, the control of the new information conduits continues.

Just like the mythical stories of the Rothschild’s and their use of pigeons (to relay information about the results of the Battle of Waterloo) giving them an upper hand in the London Financial Markets. Information or the control of it, remains the ultimate prize for economic conquistadors. Carlos Slim’s fortune is based upon such control. From his monopoly on cell phone and land-line services (Telmex, America Movil, and TracPhone), Slim has focused on distribution control, not content. His iron fist approach to consolidating an industry is legendary (his equivalent would be John D. Rockefeller). Along with his uncanny ability to buy when others are selling, has made him an economic force equivalent to Warren Buffet or previously (before he became a philanthropist to the Democratic Party) George Soros.

I believe there is no doubt that we have arrived at the end of the analog information age. We are definitely in the digital information world and its here that I believe Carlos Slim is positioning himself. Regardless of the amount of information there is out on the Internet, the New York Times retains brand power. And with that, also comes credibility (if you don’t believe me, just ask anyone who they would trust more concerning the veracity of a news story, Joe’s info blog or the nytimes.com). I’m also going to put forward a prediction. I really believe we are coming to a top in the amount of (quality) information that is being produced, why, because we can only read so much. I don’t know if Carlos Slim believes that but he has said that he does not want to control content but the vehicles that deliver it (Carlos Slim builds monopolies and just like he did in Mexico, he might just attempt to do this here).

Now humans can only process a certain amount and lets face it, the amount of waste on the web is vast. But there’s another aspect to this, and that is the role of search engines, when someone types in a search entry, how many people go beyond the first page or the first 5 entries? If your website doesn’t come up in the first page, in all likely hood it will not be picked. Therefore, making sure your website is one of the first chosen is of vital importance. And its here that the NYTimes has a huge advantage, where nearly everyone of their major stories will come up first on a search  (not to mention they are one of the top 5 on-line news sources). Something Mr. Slim has possibly taken note of.

So in an ironic twist, just like there is a shaking out in any industry, I think we will have the same thing happen with all forms of on-line official and homegrown news sources (websites, wiki’s, blogs, facebook’s and twitters). Now, it does not mean that these other sources will become non existent, it is just that they will become immaterial (I will go out on a limb and say 95% of the Internet will be irrelevant).  So, as a limited processing species, we only can read and look at a limited amount of information and for a lot of our choices we rely on pattern (name) recognition to guide us through many of our decisions. In many ways we already do this, how many people have websites they look at everyday and only those? Therefore, information preservers and curators will be looking at many familiar names, just in a different medium. A medium that Mr. Slim would like to control.