Library archive

Talk about slippery terminology! This post could turn out to be about any number of things.

Here at the Rotorua District Library we have a room designated as an archive. It contains archives. A small number of community organisations and individuals have deposited their records and memorabilia with the Library for safe-keeping and for use by current and future researchers. There is a shelf-list that we can refer to that tells us something about which organisations' materials we are holding, but other than that there is no way of knowing what we have.

Librarians are particularly bad at throwing out records - this has been noted before in many different contexts! Staff at this Library have been reluctant to discard working records, and so the archive room is a repository for old ledgers, correspondence and other files, folders of newspaper clippings, index cards and all sorts of promotional and display materials created in-house over the years. There are photograph albums covering library events both momentous and mundane, probably mostly of interest only to ex-staff of the Library who will recognise themselves and their colleagues and remember activities and events that no-one who wasn't there at the time will ever care about. Boxes and folders of such material have been optimistically or carelessly stacked in the archives room over many years. While there is a dismaying quantity to be sorted through at some point in time, you can be sure that if some particular piece of evidence of some transaction or decision were ever to be required for some special reason, these records would most likely prove to be incomplete or inadequate.

What will it take to turn these overflowing piles of stuff into an archive? What is (or should be) duplicated or housed in the Council's archives? Which stories will turn out to have relevance in the future and which can be left to fade along with the fading memories?