Though Claire is careful to write, “<em>I do not mean to imply that creating and curating an archive in the analogue world is not an intellectual exercise,”</em> she certainly seems to suggest that the broad academic community does not view archival work as intellectual.  Otherwise it would not be possible for her to ask, as she does, <em>“does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this?”</em>—and suggest that the answer is “yes.”<em> </em>She goes on to note that archival work “<em>is not in itself something for which scholars gain credit.”</em>  Why do they not gain credit?  I would suggest that it is exactly because of the perspective that archivists are not engaged in an intellectual exercise.  And why this perception?  
 
We can see a partial explanation further along in Claire’s essay:
 
<em>The argument against granting digital resources scholarly status equivalent to a journal article, monograph or critical edition must surely be that such resources are performing a service, akin to that provided by an archive or library in the analogue world: that of bringing together useful materials for other scholars to use….</em>
 
<em>… why is it then that creating a critical edition, whether print or digital form is considered to be a scholarly activity worthy of credit in its own right?</em>
 
<em>It may be because in the print world editors are called upon to make selections and decisions about the best possible copy text, and which textual variants to include….</em>
 
This conviction that archivists uncritically gather primary sources “for other scholars to use” is reinforced in Ken Price’s 2009 essay from the Whitman Archive site, "Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?” <a href="#_ftn1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a>  In it, Ken defines “the archival approach” as one that seeks “inclusiveness”—that is, gathering as comprehensive a set of Whitman material as possible.  The “editing” approach, by contrast, he explains as one that “winnows,” annotates, and provides a certain “care of treatment” for the material gathered.  
 
As an archivist myself I have an obvious stake in how my profession is perceived by others; as an archivist in a university setting I have a particular concern about how we are perceived by faculty and academic administrators.  I’m less concerned about earning labels like “intellectual” and “scholarly” than I am about being able to convey a more accurate understanding of the theory and practice of creating and administering (or curating) archives.<a href="#_ftn2" rel="nofollow">[2]</a> To concentrate on the portions of my profession that seem most germane to the current discussion, please permit me to focus on archivists gathering and cataloging sources, activities which are, to use Claire’s terms, service (or resource) for others but not perceived as scholarly endeavors in their own right.
 
As it happens, archivists themselves viewed their profession and its activities entirely as service for others until approximately the Second World War. <a href="#_ftn3" rel="nofollow">[3]</a>  The most famous and influential exposition of this position was given by a government records archivist in England, Hilary Jenkinson.<a href="#_ftn4" rel="nofollow">[4]</a>  His “moral defence” of archives, to over-simplify it, was the idea that archivists were responsible for acquiring an essentially pre-defined set of records, describing them with utmost objectivity, and doing or saying nothing that might prejudice a researcher’s interpretation of those records.<a href="#_ftn5" rel="nofollow">[5]</a>    
 
Writing after WWII, an employee of the US National Archives, Theodore Schellenberg, turned Jenkinson’s conception of the profession on its head, and his books continue to dominate archival theory and practice in this country.<a href="#_ftn6" rel="nofollow">[6]</a>  Arguably the most important change Schellenberg brought to archives is also arguably the most likely reason for someone to consider archival work “intellectual.”  Rather than being “collectors,” Schellenberg’s archivists became “selectors,” making rational, informed, but ultimately subjective decisions about what primary source materials were going to be acquired and preserved by a repository and which were not.<a href="#_ftn7" rel="nofollow">[7]</a>  Taking it as a now ineluctable fact that archivists dramatically define the sources available for scholarly research, I suppose we must all at least hope that there is a great deal of intellectual activity taking place in my profession.
 
This archival selection occurs both passively and actively, I should explain.  Passively, archivists make decisions concerning whether collections offered to their repositories are accepted or declined—and, if accepted, which portions are retained or discarded.<a href="#_ftn8" rel="nofollow">[8]</a>  Actively, archivists define collecting policies and then search for the creators of records (individuals, families, organizations, businesses, governmental units) most likely to fulfill the goals of those policies.  We solicit donations (or, if we’re institutional archivists, we ask units to transfer inactive records to our unit), sometimes over the course of a half century,<a href="#_ftn9" rel="nofollow">[9]</a> sometimes directly shaping the very records a prospective donor creates or keeps based on what we’ve told him we want.
 
Though selection may be our most intellectually demanding activity, much else that archivists do requires the type of learning and engagement <em>“for which scholars gain credit.”<a href="#_ftn10" rel="nofollow"><strong>[10]</strong></a></em>  If, “<em>As all digital humanists are aware, the act of marking up text is in itself one of scholarly interpretation,</em>” so too I must venture, is the act of arranging collections of what can be completely disorganized masses of dozens of boxes of records into coherent aggregations of folders and series that are intellectually described and physically organized to make them accessible for researchers to use.  Further, archival finding aids, in which collections of as much as several thousand boxes are summarized, analyzed, and given context through often detailed biographical sketches or organizational histories, reasonably mirror the “scholarly introductions, annotations, and textual histories” that Ken indicates give intellectual heft to the <em>Whitman Archive</em> and others like it.
 
I strongly believe that if the actual work of archivists and special collections curators were better understood, that it would be impossible to<em> </em>ask,<em> “does the name ‘archive’ under value the complex nature of what is being achieved in digital resources such as this?”</em>  On the contrary, I think the <em>Whitman Archive</em> site’s editors were even more accurate than they may have known in choosing the name, and that the name becomes more accurate still as the editors wrangle with issues such as which and how many “disciples” to include and which to exclude. Selection, analysis, structure, contextualization—all these are as fundamental to archival work as they are to the impressive Whitman digital “archive”.
 





<a href="#_ftnref1" rel="nofollow">[1]</a> Kenneth M. Price, <a href="http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00346.html" rel="nofollow">"Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?</a>” <em>The Walt Whitman Archive</em>, (2009)
 


<a href="#_ftnref2" rel="nofollow">[2]</a> At least as the profession has been conceived and practiced in the United States for the past 60 years or so.
 


<a href="#_ftnref3" rel="nofollow">[3]</a> There is a vocal minority of archival professionals writing in English who continue to advocate this older vision of their work.  See, for example, Luciana Duranti, "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory," <em>American Archivist</em> 57 (Spring 1994), 328-44 and in response Frank Boles and Mark A. Greene, "<em>Et tu</em> Schellenberg? Thoughts on the Dagger of American Appraisal Theory," <em>American Archivist</em> 59/3 (Summer 1996), pp. 298?310.
 


<a href="#_ftnref4" rel="nofollow">[4]</a> Hilary Jenkinson, <em>A Manual of Archive Administration Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making</em> (Oxford: 1922).
 


<a href="#_ftnref5" rel="nofollow">[5]</a> It may be of passing interest to note that Jenkinson did not envision archivists as serving primarily scholars; indeed, he saw such service as, in the words of one of his later intellectual disciples, “so much velvet.”  For Jenkinson, the most important use to which archival records could be put was use by their creating agencies (and collections of personal papers, among other materials considered archival today, he viewed as the province of librarians or historians).
 


<a href="#_ftnref6" rel="nofollow">[6]</a> Among his several publications, the most appropriate to introduce his thinking is probably Theodore R. Schellenberg, <em>Modern Archives:  Principles and Techniques</em> (Chicago, 1956).
 


<a href="#_ftnref7" rel="nofollow">[7]</a> This selection was made most often accompanied by the presumption that rejected material would wind up in Trotsky’s dustbin of history.
 


<a href="#_ftnref8" rel="nofollow">[8]</a>Or possibly returned to the donor, depending upon the terms of the deed of gift.
 


<a href="#_ftnref9" rel="nofollow">[9]</a> This may seem like hyperbole, but at the Minnesota Historical Society, where I was Curator of Manuscripts Acquisitions, I concluded a donation that had been initiated more than 50 years previously by my predecessors.
 


<a href="#_ftnref10" rel="nofollow">[10]</a> This may be why in the US at least, archivists are often given faculty rank when working at colleges and universities (as are their librarian brethren).
 























