Information Culture and the Archival Record

Information Culture and the Archival Record Author(s): Steven Lubar Reviewed work(s): Source: The American Archivist, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 10-22 Published by: Society of American Archivists Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40294102 . Accessed: 07/11/2011 22:13 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Society of American Archivists is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Archivist. http://www.jstor.org  The American Archivist Information Culture and the Archival Record Steven Lubar Abstract New technologiespose new challengesfor archivistsnot only becausethey change the mat- erialnatureof archives,but also becausetheychange ideasabout informationand its place in our culture.This articleuses contemporaryculturaltheoryto considerthe intersections of information,culture, and technology in archives.It argues that context is essential to understandingarchivesand thatarchivesare creatorsand reinforcersof powerand author- ity. Finally,it considerstwo archetypalarchives,assemblagesof clay tokens in the ancient NearEast,and today'sWorldWideWeb,to suggestthe importanceof consideringarchives' connectivityand context in order to understandtheiruse and power. technologies pose new problems for archivists. Archivists have responded with a vast literature describing those problems and sug- gesting waysto deal with the challenges of the new technologies. In this article, I want to step back a bit from the problems and proposed solutions to look at the bigger picture. I argue that new technologies are changing not just the materialnature of archivesbut also the verynotion of information.They are reshaping our ideas about information and our ideas about culture. To under- stand these changes, we must situate information and archives into their largercontexts. This article considers, in a general sort of way,the intersections of information,culture, and technology that arisein creatingand using archives. My thinking about information in archives comes, in part, from my work as a museum curator. Curatorsare concerned about the value and meaning of the historic artifactsin their collections because the meaning of material cul- ture is, by its nature, obscure. The artifactswe hold were created to be used, not read, and so we have to learn how to read them. Objects are open to inter- times. pretation; they mean different things to different people at different Thisarticleis a revisedversionof theauthor'skeynoteaddressat the 1997 annual meetingof theSodetyofAmerican Archivistsheldin Chicago. 10 The American Archivist, Vol. 62 (Spring 1999) : 10-22  Information Culture and the Archival Record Objects are context-sensitive, and the context is as important as the object itself. They are interactive: to understand them, we must consider their webs of interrelationshipswith other objects,with archivesand printed materials,and with people. Curatorshave had to teach their users- historians and museum visitors alike- how to read material culture. Over the years, curators have developed a body of material culture theory that is used to understand the meaning of our artifacts. Archivists,on the other hand, can take meaning for granted. For the most part, the material that archivists deal with was created intentionally to hold meaning. That is, the words were written on paper, or the images exposed on film, or the bits aligned on magnetic tape in order to record information. The original intent of these records is not alwayswhat makes them of interest to archivistsor to those using them in an archives, true, but that they had mean- ing, and can continue to have meaning, seems to go without saying.That's why they are held in archives. In recent years the interests and techniques of archivists and curators have begun to overlap in new ways. This is happening for several reasons. Curatorsare beginning to learn how to read artifactsas documents, and thus see that their work is more archival than they might have thought. New tech- nologies have changed the nature of archivaldocuments, making them more like the objects in museums. Archives are becoming more like the artifactsof material culture- not only physically, but in terms of meaning as well. But perhapsmost importantly,new waysof thinking about the nature of technology, knowledge, and power are changing the wayswe think about both museum artifactsand archives. New Ways of Thinking about Archives Today,it seems to be statingthe obviouswhen we saythat archivesare tech- nological productions, and that to understand them we need to pay attention to the technology. Archives,as never before, are clearlytechnological creations. The rise of electronic records has changed the waywe create archives, the way we use them, the waywe think about them. But archiveshave alwaysbeen tech- nological productions. Today, it seems to be stating the obvious to say that archivesof electronic messages- say,the WorldWide Web- are complex inter- connected creations- but I believe that's alwaysbeen true, for all kinds of archives. Today, the ubiquity and importance of information is obvious; but information has played a central role in culture for a very long time. The very obviousness of the new technologies, and the scale and speed of technological change, has called our attention to the fact that recordkeeping has alwaysdepended upon technology. But the new technologies suggest new ways to think about archives, both old and new. The archival record is the II  The American Archivist record of what I like to call an information culture. Archivesreflect notjust new technologies, and not just what is written on paper, but also the changes in cul- ture that accompany changing technology. The meaning and use of archives change as our information culture changes. This has been true since the begin- ning of historical records, but is increasinglyapparent and important today as we rely more and more on electronic records. New waysof thinking about information and knowledge are also changing the waywe view archives. In the forefront of this change is a group of French philosophers, sometimes called the poststructuralists.I'll be calling on these philosophers - among them Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean- François Lyotard- to help us understand the nature of archives. Poststructuralistsfocus on issues of language, knowledge, power, and technology, raising questions about the instabilityof "textuality,"and the con- stant remaking of meaning in language. They tryto move "beyondall forms of reductionist, totalizing interpretations of texts. . . . The meaning of texts, for poststructuralists,results as much from the act of reading as from the act of writing, and that being so, the diversityof readers leads to the conclusion that texts have multiple, even infinite, meanings."1The poststructuralistshave also focused on technology, pointing out "the convergence of contemporary criti- cal theory and technology."2And they have identified archivesas a place of lan- guage and technology where knowledge and power coalesce and "instabilityof textuality"takes place. Let me outline my argument from here out. I want to look first at creat- ing and using archives. Here, I will consider the nature of texts removed from their original contexts and resituated in archival contexts. Next, I will look at archives and technology. In particular,I want to examine archives as a source of power and question the relationship of modern technological society to its archives.In the third section I will present two historical examples of the tech- nology of archives. Finally, I will suggest some of the waysthat this theoretical and historical discussion might change how we think about archives. Creating Archives Why are there archives? Here I want to introduce a wonderfully evoca- tive, if extremely difficult, book: Jacques Derrida's ArchiveFever.This book is about the complex relationship in archives of memory, archaeology, and the archontic- that is, the power of the state as keeper of archives. Derrida starts 1MarkPoster, TheMode ofInformation:Poststructuralism and Sodai Context(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1990), 81. 2 George P. Landow, Hypertext:The Convergenceof Contemporary CriticalTheoryand Technology(Baltimore andLondon:Johns HopkinsUniversityPress,1992), especially27-30. Foran analysisof Derrida'sposi- tion on the relationshipof computertechnologyandpoststructuralism, see Poster,ModeofInformation, 100-101. 12  Information Culture and the Archival Record with the origins of archives, posing questions about the relationship between recording and remembering: Weareenmald'archieve: in need of archives.. . . [We]burnwitha passion. . . neverto rest,interminably, fromsearchingfor the archiverightwhereit slips away. ... It is to have a compulsive,repetitive,and nostalgicdesirefor the an archive, irrepressible desireto returnto the origin,a homesickness,a nos- talgiafor the returnto the mostarchaicplace of absolutecommencement. No desire,no passion,no drive,no compulsion. . . canarisefora personwho is not already,in one wayor another,enmald'archieve.5 Now,bywayof explanation:Derrida's"archive" is not the sortof archivesthat employs members of the Society of American Archivists. It is an archive in a more psychoanalytical,more cultural sense. Derrida defines an archive in the most general way:an archiveis a public, prosthetic, memory. That is, it is a place where we use technology to improve our memory and make it availableto oth- ers. As places of memory and of technology, archives are a place of origin and a place of perpetuity, a place of stasis and of order. As public places, they are places of secrets yet also of discovery. "Archivefever," then, is the desire for memory, the urge to remember in both senses of the word: both to store in memory and to retrieve from memory. Derrida'spoint is that "archiving" - our prosthetic memories, or technolo- gies of remembering- does not just affect archives.It also affects the nature of the archived work. The process of saving into memory, of "archiving,"and of removing from memory back into our lives, shapes the process of production of memory, of knowledge, of the self. Derrida continues: the archive... is not onlythe placeforstockingandforconservingan archiv- able content of thepastwhichwouldexist in anycase, such as, withoutthe archive,one stillbelievesit wasor willhavebeen. No, the technicalstructure of the archivingarchivealsodeterminesthe structureof the archivable content even in its verycominginto existenceand in its relationshipto the future. The archivization producesas muchas it recordsthe event. Archivaltechnology, in other words, determines not merely the "moment of the conservationalrecording,"but also "theveryinstitution of the archivable event."4In other words, how we remember shapes what we remember. Now, Derrida is famously opaque and obscure, and he seems to revel in these qualities. (We only read him because he raises such interesting questions, because he makes us think about things in new ways.) But in some ways he is repeating an earlier, equally difficult but rather more popular philosopher, LewisCarroll.I am referring,of course, to that obscure and peculiar book, Alice 3 Jacques Derrida, ArchiveFever:A Freudian Impression,trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91. 4 Derrida, ArchiveFever,16-18. Emphasis in original. 13  The American Archivist ThroughtheLookingGlass.The White Queen, explaining the advantagesof liv- ing backwards,tells Alice: ". . . there's one great advantagein it, that one's mem- ory works both ways."Alice is annoyed, and replies, "I'msure mineonly works one way. ... I can't remember things before they happen," only to be scolded by the White Queen: "It'sa poor sort of memory that only worksbackward."5 An archives,Derridaargues,is more like the White Queen's notion of mem- ory than it is like Alice's common sense notion of memory.It worksboth forward and backwards.Yes,we use an archivesto remember things after they happen. But if we think of the records in archivesas points of inscription, as sites of cul- tural production, we realize that they serve, if not to remember things before they happen, to remember things as they happen. Indeed, the process of "archivization"makesthings happen by allowingus to make sense of what is hap- pening. Remembering, after all, has two opposite, complementarymeanings. Archivesshape not only our memory, but also our history,our culture, our world. Anthropologists have been the most thorough analystsof this, for, along with psychoanalystslike Freud and postmodernists like Derrida, they refuse to take memory for granted. MaryDouglas, in HowInstitutionsThink,suggeststhat, for anthropologists, "remembering is [a] peculiar thing that needs to be explained." The wonder for anthropologists, she notes, is how people with primitive technology ever remember things at all. Her answeris that the mem- ories are locked into social structures.She writes that "the strengths and weak- nesses of recall depend on a mnemonic system that is the whole social order."6 Different social systems,Douglas argues, have different types of memories. Competitivesocial systemshave weak memories. Complex hierarchicalsocieties have good memory systems,for they need to recall many reference points from the past. "Coherence and complexity in public memory,"she writes, "willtend to correspond to coherence and complexity at the social level."7 One might restate this another way:We are our archives. Our archives, our memories, reflect our world. What can we say about our society, based on our memory, our archives?What do we bother to preserve?What do we want to remember? Here I want to turn to Foucault, who argued in his book Disciplineand Punish that the panopticon - the prison designed so that the guards might see every move every prisoner makes- is a fit analogy for our society. The prisoners- all of us- never know when they are being watched, so they must behave as if they are alwaysbeing watched. The power of the panop- ticon lies not in the fact that it is all-seeing,but rather that it recordswhat it sees, that it keeps track of not only what is going on, but of what has already tran- spired.Archives- files, account books, and time tables- providethe foundation 5 Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, in Martin Gardner, The AnnotatedAlice (New York: Bramhall House, 1960), 247-48. 6 Mary Douglas, How InstitutionsThink (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 71-72. 7 Douglas, How InstitutionsThink,80. 14  Information Culture and the Archival Record ofthat paradigmaticinstitution of modern society, the location of its authority, the source of its power. It is not enough just to control the present; to control the future, we must also control memory, the past, the archives.8 Using Archives With the discussion of archives as a site of power, we move from creating archivesto using archives. Creatingarchivesproduces power. So too does using archives.Derridawritesthat "thereis not political power without control of the archive. . . Effective democratization can alwaysbe measured by this essential criterion:the participationin and the access to the archive,its constitution, and its interpretation."9 Archives as public memory are a place of power because, writes Derrida, they undertake to make sense of memory. He identifies five effects of "archiv- ing" on memory. For Derrida, "archiving"consists of: • unification • identification • classification,and • consigning, in two meanings- both in its meaning of entrusting or handing over, and • consigning in its more literal meaning of gathering together signs, that is, establishing a system.10 The lesson from this is simple: We must think of archivesas active, not passive, as sites of power, not as recorders of power. Archives don't simply recordthe work of culture; they dothe work of culture. In what way do archives do cultural work? Bruno Latour, a philosopher and historian of science and technology, maintains that it is the archives- "the most despised of all ethnographic objects: the file or the record"- that makes rationalization and bureaucracypossible: The "cracy" of bureaucracy is mysteriousandhardto study,butthe "bureau" is somethingthatcanbe empiricallystudied,andwhichexplains,becauseof its structure,whysomepoweris givento the averagemindjust bylookingat files:domainswhich are far apartbecome literallyinches apart;domains whichareconvolutedand hiddenbecomeflat. "Inour culture,"Latour continues, paper shuffling "isthe source of an essen- tial power."11 8 Michel Foucault, Disciplineand Punish (New York:Vintage, 1995) . 9 Derrida, ArchiveFever,4. 10Derrida, ArchiveFever,3. 11Bruno Latour, "Drawing Things Together," in Representationin ScientificPractice,edited by Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 54-55. 15  The American Archivist Just putting things on paper is a source of power. "Inscriptionsallow con- scription'1is how Latour puts it; they allow one to make effective arguments, to assemble allies: "The 'great man' is a little man looking at a good map."Latour gives a variety of explanations for the power that representations give scien- tists. Representations, the things in archives, can be completely dominated; they can be reshuffled and recombined and superimposed; and they can be moved and yet remain unchanged. Archives, Latour argues, following Foucault, are power.12 In societies like ours, where archives are used in the service of system, they have enormous power. They are the tools- perhaps "weapons"is more accurate- of an asymmetricalrelationship, in the same way that the anthro- pologist's maps and drawingsand writingsare asymmetrical.Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other:How AnthropologyMakes Its Object,notes that the anthro- pologist "createsa space and a time" in which he or she places other cultures, an activitythat "primitive"cultures do not reciprocate.13 Indeed, we might generalize this: most archives represent asymmetrical communications. Archives do not simply record information; they record the flow of information, the use of information. Most of the time, in most insti- tutions, information flows in one direction. Archives reflect and reinforce the power relationships of the institution that organizes them; they represent not just a technological solution, but also an organizational solution. They docu- ment and carry out not only knowledge and technique, but also culture and power. Archives Technology The technology of archivesis of a piece with their place in society, reflect- ing and reinforcing archives'role as a medium of power. The technology of the records is important in a practical way, of course. What is saved is limited by technological constraints. If ink fades, we have blank paper; if wood rots, we have only the records carved in stone; if the magnetic tape can no longer be read, we've lost the data. A given technology only allows certain kinds of archives;only certain things get inscribed. Before voice recording, there were only written archives;before movies, only words and voices and images. The archivalrecord is shaped by our technology in a practicalway. But the technological medium has more effect on archives than merely their content or longevity.Technologies also shape archivesin more profound ways.New communications technologies, after all, do not simply increase the efficiency of communications; they also shape both the user and the messages 12Latour, ThingsTogether,"50, 56 and 44-46. Emphasisin original. "Drawing 13 Johannes Fabian, Timeand the Other:HowAnthropology MakesIts Object(New York:Columbia University Press,1983), quotedin Latour,"Drawing ThingsTogether,"38. 16  Information Culture and the Archival Record themselves, an argument stated in its most reductionist form by Marshall McLuhanas "the medium is the message." A long line of communicationstheoristssince McLuhanhave reconsidered the issue in subtlerways.Some have argued, following Marx,that access to infor- mation is dependent on class. Neo-Marxistsargue that better communications allowincreasedculturalhegemony. Classicaleconomists assume that the market drivesaccess to communications. Mark Poster, in The Mode of Information:Poststructuralismand Social Context, contends that new communications technologies shape the "structureof sym- bolic exchange."Everytechnology, everyage, he writes,has its own form of sym- bolic exchange. Talkleads to a face-to-faceexchange. The technology of writing and reading leads to a "selfconstructed as an agent centered in rational [or] imaginaryautonomy."Electronic writing leads to a self that is decentered, dis- persed, and multiplied in continuous instability.In each stage, the "relationof language and society, idea and action, self and other" is different.14 Poster's analysisof the "modes of information," the effects of communi- cations on our culture and ourselves, suggests that we must study not only the content but also the forms of information storage and retrieval.If, as he claims, "each method of preserving and transmitting information profoundly inter- venes in the networkof relationshipsthat constitute a society,"15 then it is impor- tant for archiviststo consider not just text but also context, not just content but also form. Poster's argument partakes of what historians of technology call techno- logical determinism, that is, that the new technology creates a new culture. Communications theorist RaymondWilliamsargues the opposite: In no waydoes a new communicationssystemcreatea new societyor new socialconditions.The decisiveand earliertransformation of industrialpro- duction,and its new socialforms, which had grownout of a long historyof capitalaccumulationand workingtechnicalimprovements,created new needs but also new possibilities,and the communicationssystems,downto television,weretheirintrinsicoutcome.16 Posterand Williamsdisagreeon which waythe causationruns, that is, which came first,technology or culture. HistorianCarolynMarvinformulatesa middle position;looking for causationin both directions.The historyof electrical com- munications,Marvinwrites,"isless the evolution of technical efficienciesin com- munication than a series of arenas for negotiating issues crucial to the con- duct of social life."These negotiations may or may not change social life: "New technologies intended to enhance familiarsocial routines may reorganize them 14Poster, Mode of Information,6. 15Poster, Mode of Information,7. 16 Raymond Williams, Television:Technologyand CulturalForm(New York:Schocken Books, 1975), 19. 17  The American Archivist so they become new events."17Marvin'sis a gentler form of determinism:new technology, usuallyinvented for old purposes, and reinforcing old ways,at the same time opens new doors, and invites us to enter and reorganize our world. The pen makes it easier to saysome things;the printing press, others;electronic interchange, still others. One can accept any of these positions - Marvin'sseems most appealing to me- and still have an agenda that puts technology and culture in close con- tact, with archivesjust about in the middle. That means we should think about archives as a reflection not just of technology, or of culture, but as one of those arenas where we negotiate "issues crucial to the conduct of life." As I pointed out earlier: archives are one of the places where we do the work of culture, that is, the messy work of negotiating power and ideas and memory. Two Examples We can understand these processes of power and negotiations by examin- ing actual archives. I'll briefly consider two archives, from opposite ends of archivalhistory, to reveal some of the waysthat archivesreflect the interplayof memory, context, power, and technology. Let me startwith the firstarchives,which originatedin the ancient Near East, and which, arguably, made possible the beginnings of civilization. The first archiveswere simple assemblagesof clay tokens used for keeping trackof quan- tities of grain and the number of animals. These tokens date from about 8000 B.C. During the fourth millennium, more complex tokens appeared,represent- ing finished products like textiles, vessels, and tools. The next step was writing, which, according to current theories, derived from counting; you wrote to keep trackof your tokens. Someone realized that once the number and type of token had been writtendown, the tokens were no longer needed. Voila . . . writing!18 With the rise of more complex societies, more complex accounting was necessary.Counting took place in egalitariansocieties; accounting was needed in ranked societies. The earliest archives,basically,were the work of tax collec- tors. Archivesof these tokens represent payments due at the next harvest,with seals representing hierarchies of accountants. The new archival technology both allowed and expressed the social structure. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strausssummarizedthese themes: The onlyphenomenawhich,alwaysandin all partsof the world,seemsto be linkedwiththe appearanceof writing... is the establishment of hierarchical societies,consistingof mastersand slaves,andwhereone partof the popula- 17 Carolyn Marvin, When Old TechnologiesWereNew: Thinking about ElectricCommunicationin the Late NineteenthCentury(New York:Oxford University Press, 1988), 4 and 190. 18Denise Schmandt-Besserat, BeforeWriting,Vol.I:FromCountingto Cuneiform(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), chapters 7-9. 18  Information Culture and the Archival Record tionis madetoworkforthe otherpart.. . . Andwhenweconsiderthe firstuses to whichwritingwasput,it wouldseemquiteclearthatit wasconnectedfirst andforemostwithpower:itwasusedforinventories, catalogues,censuses,laws andinstructions;in allinstances,whetherthe aimwasto keepcheckon mate- rialpossessionsor on humanbeings,it is evidenceof the powerexercisedby somemen overothermen andoverworldlypossessions.19 Even these very first archives- perhaps especially these very first archives- reflect my themes of the interplayof memory and power, cultural opportunity and technological invention. They reflect a straightforwardpower relationship. Mysecond example, the WorldWide Web, playschanges on these themes. Consider the nature of a text on the World Wide Web, in contrast to a text on paper, or on a clay tablet. A text on paper is words, carefully set in order. It is linear at heart, with sentences, paragraphs,and pages in defined order. It cap- tures a relativelysimple form of authorship, of the organization of power. It is written, then read. A text on the Web, on the other hand, is as an active, living experience. It encourages interaction; it is linked to other texts, other places. Both authorship and content are fluid. The reader shares authority with the writer.Power relationships are more complex. Mark.C. Taylor,a philosopher at WilliamsCollege, describesthis livingtext as a kind of virtualreality.20 A hypertextis not a closedworkbut an open fabricof heterogeneoustraces and associationsthatare in a processof constantrevisionand supplementa- tion.The structureof a hypertextis not fixedbutis forevershiftingandalways mobile.The interplayof surfaceanddepthgiveswayto a perpetualdisplace- ment of surfacesthatis anythingbut superficial. . . Hierarchyunravelsin a web where top and bottom, up and down, lose consistent meaning. Everything everywhere is middle.Insteadof an organicwhole,a hypertextis a rent texturewhose meaningis unstableand whose boundariesare con- stantlychanging.21 MichaelJoyce, perhaps the foremost hypertext novelist, describes this active experience of text as "wordsthat yield;" he finds pleasure in the "roly-poly pushover"qualityof the text.22 It's no surprise that much of the discussion of "Whatnext for the World Wide Web?"relates to the ways in which the use of the documents might be 19Claude Lévi-Strauss,in with ClaudeLévi-Strauss(London: Jonathan Georges Charbonnier, Conversations Cape, 1961), 29-30. 20Interview of Mark C. Taylor in Seulemunde,Issue 3 (available at <http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/tay- lor/taylor.html>) 21Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies:MediaPhilosophy(London and New York:Routledge, 1994) , Telewriting 6. 22Michael pedagogyand poetics(Ann Arbor: University Joyce, "AFeel for Prose," in Of TwoMinds:Hypertext of Michigan Press, 1995) quoted in Stuart Moultrop, "No War Machine," in Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz, ReadingMatters:Narrativein theNew MediaEcology(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997) . Reproduced at <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/ moulthrop/essays/war_machine.html>. 19  The American Archivist captured: two-waylinks, a fine-grained web of usage relationships, commen- tary, and metadata. These data, in revealing use, capture the complex power relationships of the Web as archives.The Web situatesinformation in an unsta- ble structure; knowing about the information, and knowing about how it is used, helps to stabilize the data, and makes clearer the power relationships it serves. The Web is infinitely more flexible than the clay tablet, but similarin its recording of the structuresof power. The conceptual shift from texts to hypertexts,from words that are firm to words that yield, from stacks to knots- from papers to Webs- is significant. It comes as something new and surprising to literary critics, who read in it the "death of narrative."It probably scares some archivists.How can one retain a constantly changing, unstable, text? But I'd like to argue that, in a more pro- found way,this sense of an endlessly connected text should come as no surprise to an archivist.We can easily apply this new sense of archives to the stacks of paper archivistshave alwaysdealt with. Archivistshave alwaysinsisted on main- taining what might be called, in a Web world, the connectivityof their stacksof paper. Archivists have always considered how the papers were originally ordered, how they were shaped and used, as clues to how to organize the papers in the archives.The Web simply reminds us of the intrinsic linkages within all archives. Conclusion The connectivity of hypertext archives, and the relation of power and memory of the first archives, hold practical lessons for today. In an age when language is famously unstable, the power of the archive stems from its ability to bring together information about information. Jean-François Lyotard, in ThePostmodern Condition:A Reporton Knowledge, argues that "theperformativity [that is, the effectiveness] of an utterance, be it denotative or prescriptive, increases proportionally to the amount of information about its referent one has at one's disposal. Thus the growth of power, and its self-legitimation, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operativityof information."23What makes information usable is the amount of information we have about it. With the mention of information about information, we arriveat the most fascinating aspect of the modern archives; metadata. Metadata is data about data. It is the key to understanding the archives.Foucault is famous for arguing for the centrality of discourse, not the centrality of things and artifacts;and it is in metadata that we find discourse, and it is in discourse that we find culture. 23 Jean-François Lyotard, ThePostmodernCondition:A Reporton Knowledge,translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theoryand HistoryofLiterature,Vol. 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47. 20  Information Culture and the Archival Record We need data about our data, information about our information. In metadata we seek the certaintywe have lost in data. Archivists use metadata to attest to archival certainty, reliability, and authenticity.24But metadata might mean even more when we focus not on the documents themselves but on their use. Metadatais to the archivistwhat con- text is to the archeologist. Context, writes anthropologist Ian Hodder, "isthe totality of the relevant environment, where 'relevant' refers to any significant relationship to the object- that is, a relationship necessary for discerning the object's meaning." Objects are only mute, Hodder says, "whenthey are out of their text"- that is, without their context, their metadata.25 CarolynMarvin,the historianof communications,indicateswhy this is true: Media[andhere,I thinkit'sfairto substitutethewordarchives]arenot fixed objects:they have no naturaledges. They are constructedcomplexesof habits,beliefs,andproceduresembeddedin elaborateculturalcodesof com- munication.The historyof mediais nevermore or less than the historyof theiruses,whichleadus awayfromthemto the socialpracticesandconflicts theyilluminate.26 What is important, then, is cultural production. Context is all-important. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, two historians of science, suggest why: "itis misleading to investigatelanguage through an analysisof words and 'meanings' isolated from the pragmaticsituations in which they are used ... a kind of mys- terious force and historical significance seems to accrue to rules and proposi- tions when they are isolated from their pragmatic contexts."27 Whereas museum curatorsare as deeply concerned with the historyof the uses of the objects in their possession as with their manufacture,archivistshave tended to consider the creation of their documents as most important. But, as both the first archives and now the Web remind us so vividly,documents are active- notjust Web documents,but all documents. Documents- archives- are sites of culturalproduction. That means they are centers of power.Archives,and the records of archivaluse, can tell us about the relationships between makers and users, and the culture that weaves them together. They illuminate social practice.Archivesthemselves are texts to be interpreted. The WorldWide Web makes apparentwhat has alwaysbeen the case:infor- mation is interconnected in complex ways,and is used in even more complex ways.What is often of greatest interest is not the information, but the inter- 24Luciana Duranti, "Reliabilityand Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications," Archivaria39 (Spring 1995): 5-10. 25Ian Hodder, "Introduction," in The Archaeologyof Contextual Meanings, edited by Ian Hodder (Cambridge University Press, 1987), quoted in Reading Material Culture:Structuralism,Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism,edited by Christopher Tilley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 26Marvin, WhenOld TechnologiesWereNew, 8. 27 in ScientificPractice,vii-viii. Lynch and Woolgar, Representation 21  The American Archivist connections and the manner of use. Metadatacan be as important as data. The "archivefever" of which Derrida speaks is a fever for remembering in all its complexity, for storing and retrieving memory- data- archives, in all their complexity.For archiviststo fullyunderstand and appreciatetheir archives,and to get the fullest use out of them, they must go beyond issues of reliabilityand authenticity to consider connectivity and context, use and power. 22