This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of Margaret Cross Norton, “Some Legal Aspects of Archives,” American Archivist 8, no. 1 (1945): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.8.1.241151083v607381.

By Heather Briston, University of California, San Diego [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

The major themes of “Some Legal Aspects of Archives” by Margaret Cross Norton are drawn from the two sections of the address: “Introductory Remarks” and “Some Legal Aspects of Archives.” In the first section, the themes center on the profession—where and how we needed to grow, where we had made strides, and where we could improve. The second section focuses on institutional records and their management. In addressing these themes in turn, Norton paints a picture of a professional organization developing its unique perspective on what it means to be an archivist and articulating how it will distinguish itself from what has come before. In the eighty years since Norton gave this address, it’s not so much that these themes have disappeared or that they have been completely resolved, but rather that there are new perspectives about what constitutes the archival profession and how we must grow and evolve to accommodate new viewpoints.  

It is important to remember the context of this address. It was made by one of the founders of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) very early in the organization’s history. Moreover, at the 1944 annual meeting, there were only sixty-two attendees, the smallest audience for an annual meeting at that time.[1] Therefore, we can assume that Norton knew her audience well, and they, her. Given this, the address is then better understood as a piece that was meant to challenge those present to consider the current state of archival work, particularly institutional records and their management. Given the membership of the society at that time, and the extensive focus on manuscript collections and personal papers, her words of caution and particular perspective working with records would not be surprising. However, I do wonder how understood and appreciated she was at the time. In many ways, Norton resembled her audience, but she was different in two crucial ways. She was the first woman and the first state archivist to lead SAA.[2] She had a vested interest in making sure that the profession was growing and evolving to meet the needs of records creators and users, not resting on its laurels or holding on to a restrictive definition of who was an archivist, what were archives, and how archives should be used and managed.         

In 1944, the most common route to the archival profession was via a history degree, usually an MA or PhD. As Norton notes in her address, many archivists were active members of the American Historical Association, and as she alludes to in her remarks, for some individuals it was a question of being a historian first and an archivist second. When I first became an archivist twenty-five years ago, there were still active discussions at my first SAA annual meeting regarding what educational background provided the best training and background for an archivist, and at the time the discussion was still centered around whether it was an MA, an MLIS, or both. We can see from the recent A*CENSUS II results that over the intervening years, the profession has seen growth—an increase of 52 percent—in the number of people entering from the MLIS route, which was the highest increase in any degree type.[3]

Another theme Norton addresses extensively is the profession’s preparedness, or lack thereof, to create broadly accepted archival theory and practice to meet the needs of the Works Progress Administration’s Historical Records Survey and the advent of the National Archives. As Norton states, “I need not remind archivists of the chagrin with which we realized that we had neither plans nor technique for meeting the challenging opportunities which had come to us” (p. 1). We know it frustrated her, as the lack of a ready theory and practice to address the needs of these highly visible and massive records projects must have frustrated others, and she wanted to make sure that the profession was not caught unprepared again. From my experience, I would say that she largely succeeded in ensuring that the profession develops robust records theories and practices. As a profession, not only have we developed theories and practices that form a foundation for all aspects of our work, we also have ensured that those practices evolved to meet the needs of both the records and our users. In addition, since this address, the profession has coalesced around its role of sharing its expertise and speaking up for the needs of users and the records themselves, heeding Norton’s call.[4] Her discussion of the role of the National Archives in SAA reflects the discussions that were occurring at the time regarding the relationship between state and national archives and their roles in shaping the profession (p. 3). In current SAA meetings, it is not unusual to see panels bringing together those working with manuscripts and those working with institutional records, even more so in the SAA meetings held in conjunction with the National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA) and the Council of State Archivists (COSA).

In her opening remarks, Norton also warns her audience about being too erudite (p. 3). My hope is that this got a laugh from the audience, but her point was that as a new organization there was a need to articulate modern theories and practices for managing historical and governmental archives, as well as a need to publish more articles about archival practice and processes in American Archivist. It is worth noting here that following her time as SAA’s president, Norton served as editor of American Archivist.[5] During her career, she wrote about the need for practical articles about the management of archives rather than articles about the historical content in the archival records. I feel that as an organization and a profession we have met her call on that score. We have decades of excellent articles both in our journal and newsletters, but also in scores of monographs that delve into the theory and practice of managing archives.[6] However, her statement does echo some of the conference conversations from early in my career about the curriculum in programs teaching archives and records management. The issue there focused on what was the best balance of theory and practical training.[7] At the time, it was a push and pull between understanding what to do and why to do it. Now we have expanded archival understanding to include what impact theories and practices have on the communities represented, or conversely not represented, in the archives.[8]

Norton’s final point in her introductory remarks is a taking to task for those assembled. Calls for active participation in professional organizations are not new, and in many ways inactive committee members can be a by-product of collaborative work, whether that be in the workplace or volunteer settings. The example she gives is quite notable: she was a member of a committee for five years, during which she had never heard from the chairman even when she wrote him directly (p. 4). At the very least I read her remarks as a warning to all of those in the audience who had volunteered for SAA committees, particularly if you were a chair of a committee on which she served!

In the second section, “Some Legal Aspects of Archives,” Norton focuses on records management and institutional records. Specific topics include the definition of a record, records’ evidentiary value, public access to records, public records in private hands, and records in decentralized environments. To anyone reading her address eighty years later, Norton does not start any controversies or raise questions that we have not raised ourselves over the intervening years. However, it is here that we must remember to bring a contextual lens to the address. Yes, Norton’s themes are not terribly earth-shattering today, but at the time they were quite new. For example, it had only been a decade since the National Archives was established by Congress in 1934, as an independent agency tasked with preserving and caring for the records of the US government. Since Norton states that she “participated by proxy in a discussion of some of the differences between archives and historical manuscripts” (pp. 4–5) at the 1943 annual meeting, we can gather from the address that it probably was not the first time she had raised these issues, unique to institutional records, at a professional meeting. But she was using the platform of her presidential address to bring these issues in front of the entire membership—both for those in attendance and those who would read her words later.

As Norton notes in the address, the profession had traditionally applied the same practices across collections, whether they consisted of manuscripts or records. However, her goal was to lay out the need for new thinking and new processes that specifically addressed questions regarding archiving records produced by institutions, organizations, and government entities. While we may now take all of this for granted, at the time she may have seen what would be coming to the doorstep of every government archive around the country, including her own: a wave of records created during World War II across federal and state governments, spurring processes that would eventually spread across both public and private enterprise.[9] She likely anticipated that all of these records would have to be managed somewhere by someone, and rather than be caught without solid practice and theory in place, she used her address as a call to action.

One aspect that struck me while reading her address is the discussion about the lack of clear legislation defining what constitutes a “record.” Today it is difficult to conceive of a time without the Federal Records Act of 1950;[10] the Presidential Records Act of 1978;[11] and the myriad of laws that prescribe the preservation, retention, and destruction of records on all government levels. Because of a lack of clarity in the law as to what was a record, Norton was lamenting the inability of archivists to speak to questions from records creators of what was important to retain or destroy. Interestingly, in the early part of my career, we were having the same conversation regarding the born-digital environment, which required challenging existing theory and practice to better understand what needed to evolve in the digital environment to achieve a shared understanding of a “record.”[12] Even today, while we have a clear understanding of what constitutes a record in the profession, we still help records creators to understand the inherent qualities of records, and why they should be preserved, even when to those individuals the materials “don’t look like records.”

Another area that Norton addresses is the role of records as legal evidence. To her audience, this was probably not an unknown role for archives, but at the time, the role of historical evidence was paramount in most discussions in the archival world. Her remarks lay out the fundamentals of evidentiary value. She not only details the need to preserve records but also the need for certification of records, particularly in the context of, at the time, new modes of preservation like microfilming and duplication. She also outlines the process for which an archivist would testify to the chain of custody and the content of the record. This is well done, and it probably gave great insight to those archivists who were not regularly focused on archives’ evidentiary role, or the policies, procedures, and processes that would be required to faithfully attest to a record under oath.

Norton also explores the closely related topic of public access to public records in her remarks. We must remember that at this time we didn’t have the Freedom of Information Act, nor did we have the detailed state public records acts that we are used to navigating today. In Norton’s time, prior to legislation, public records access focused on deeds and other personal records housed in ledgers and accessed in county courthouses. I can appreciate her call to create more copies of records to protect them from loss and wear and tear. This has been a practice widely embraced by repositories over time, whether through photocopies, microfilm, or digitization. However, it was probably not a call that was met with enthusiasm at the time. While everyone in the room probably appreciated the need for use copies, this was not within the reach of most repositories without the advent of grant-supported reformatting or fiscal tussles to increase agency funding.

Another area in her address that all institutional archivists are familiar with is the issue of replevin or returning public records from private hands. Despite clear laws, statutes, and policies, institutional archivists have always needed to chase after official records. In many cases, the retention is unintentional and related to the comingling of records as they are stored during current creation and use. For example, a faculty member who serves as a department chair and dean does not always recognize the differences between the records they are creating as they fulfill different roles within the university.

A final theme in Norton’s address that bears discussion is one that, at least in my experience, is not raised as often as it should be: the role and impact that being in a decentralized democracy has on recordkeeping and archiving of governmental and institutional records. Those of us who have experience managing institutional records are well aware that we are vastly outnumbered by record creators, and all of the policies, laws, and procedures in the world will not necessarily make people aware of or attentive to records management and retention policies. In the past, when I presented on this topic from a US perspective, particularly to an international audience, I’m met with looks of surprise because European countries that come from a “registrar” system—e.g., Germany and Austria—have a long expectation of records creators identifying and classifying records from their creation and distribution.[13] Sometimes when trying to improve the records culture at an institution, there is an old cliche that says, “never let a good controversy go to waste,” and those of us who have spent any amount of time in institutional or government archives know it well. On the one hand, no one wants to face a recordkeeping controversy on their watch. At the same time, we also know that when it comes to the records creators with whom we work, sometimes it takes the audit, lawsuit, or article above the fold in the local newspaper to gain traction on our policies and procedures.

One of the interesting things about Norton’s presidential address is the time capsule experience that it provides. Here we see an environment before structured and scheduled records retention and before broadly accepted theories and practices of appraisal and records destruction. It’s also interesting to see her exhorting her audience to embrace activities that we take for granted today in institutional archives, such as chain of custody and evidentiary value. Her address reminds me of articles and presentations from the early years of my career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we had an evolving understanding of electronic records, their management, and their preservation. During that period, archivists took the theory and practice that had developed over time in the archival profession and analyzed whether and how they were fit for purpose in the born-digital context.

Looking at the volumes of archival literature and records management literature that have been produced in the eighty years since Norton gave her address, I think the topics and themes that she raised have been amply expanded upon. I would argue that as the medium, mode, and other ingredients of archival and records management have changed over time, we as a profession have stepped up and written and presented about them. While in the moment it may feel like the environment is changing faster than we can address the changes, there are always people asking the hard questions and staying curious to help us address new opportunities in the profession. As for what is missing in the address, all the societal, cultural, technological, and professional changes that archives and records have seen in the past eighty years are, of course, missing. That is not so much a flaw but a fact of the work. Historical articles must be closely read in context. The learning to be gained from them may not be currently applicable but is a way of providing perspective on what has changed, and where little change or understanding has occurred.

So, given all of this, what do I think about the relevance of this address for archivists today? To be honest, the content on its own has not weathered well. It would not be something that I would read for inspiration or for archival wisdom to be applied in my daily work. However, as a historical window it does provide us with insight into how the themes around records management, evidentiary value, etc., which feel very settled and concrete today, were not always thus. This should spur us to think about how theory and practice grow and evolve over time. Norton was exhorting her audience to grow, evolve the profession, and consider practicalities. One of the challenges of looking backwards is that the questions of the past seem quaint because the intervening debate and discussion have already occurred, and the sharp points of disagreement have worn down over time. But there will always be dissent and disagreement. There will always be new things to learn, new practices to adopt, new ways to understand what we do and why we do it. It is our role, as members of the profession, to continue our learning and actively participate in our professional evolution and growth.

---

[1] Society of American Archivists, “Annual Meetings Locations and Attendance,” https://www2.archivists.org/conference/annual-meeting-locations-and-attendance#40s (accessed May 4, 2024).

[2] Society of American Archivists, “Presidents,” https://www2.archivists.org/history/leaders/presidents (accessed May 4, 2024).

[3] Makala Skinner and Ioana G. Hulbert, A*CENSUS II All Archivists Survey Report, Society of American Archivists and ITHAKA S+R, August, 22, 2022, https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/acensus-ii-all-archivists-survey-report/ (accessed May 4, 2024).

[4] For a detailed analysis of article trends in American Archivist, see J. Gordon Daines III, Cory L. Nimer, and Jacob R. Lee, “Exploring the American Archivist: Corpus Analysis Tools and the Professional Literature,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, Article 3 (2018), https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/3/ (accessed May 24, 2024).

[5] Society of American Archivists, “Editors, American Archivist,”  https://www2.archivists.org/history/leaders/editors%2C-american-archivist (accessed May 4, 2024).

[6] See, for example, the SAA monograph publications in the Archival Fundamentals Series III (https://www2.archivists.org/archival-fundamentals-series-III) and the Trends in Archives Practice series (https://www2.archivists.org/publications/book-publishing/trends-in-archives-practice).

[7] For a discussion of the changing nature of archival education see Richard Cox, “The Society of American Archivists and Graduate Education: Meeting at the Crossroads,” American Archivist 63, no. 2 (2000): 368–79, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.63.2.r64t27100718121r. Cox’s article was included in the American Archivist’s Special Issue on Archival Education (Fall/Winter 2000, Volume 63, Issue 2).

[8] See Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, and Mario H. Ramirez, ‘“To Suddenly Discover Yourself Existing’: Uncovering the Impact of Community Archives,” American Archivist 79, no. 1 (2016): 56–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.79.1.56.

[9] For some context, Theodore R. Schellenberg first articulated the need to develop a new theory of processing, differentiating from what was seen in European archives of the time, to include appraisal in 1939, and later fully articulated the theory in Disposition of Federal Records (1949) and The Appraisal of Modern Public Records (1956). See Jane Smith, “Theodore R. Schellenberg: Americanizer and Popularizer,” American Archivist 44, no. 4 (1981): 317–18, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.44.4.2227r081gnx07r0p.

[10] Federal Records Act of 1950, 44 U.S.C. Chapters 21, 29, 31 and 33.

[11] Presidential Records Act of 1978, 44 U.S.C. § 2201-2207.

[12] For a contemporaneous discussion of these topics in the environment of early born-digital records see Philip Bantin, “The Indiana University Electronic Records Project Revisited,” American Archivist 62, no. 1 (1999): 153–63, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.62.1.b605px88t6245j14; and Linda Henry, “Schellenberg in Cyberspace,” American Archivist 61, no. 2 (1998): 309–27, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.61.2.f493110467x38701.

[13] For more comparisons of European archival practice see Michel Duchein, “The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe,” American Archivist. 55, no. 1 (1992): 14–25, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.55.1.k17n44g856577888; and David Bearman, “Diplomatics, Weberian Bureaucracy, and the Management of Electronic Records in Europe and America,” American Archivist 55, no. 1 (1992): 168–81, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.55.1.240053825k3v3648.