This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of James M. O’Toole, “On the Idea of Permanence,” American Archivist 52, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 10–25, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.52.1.3x85283576r43387.

By Sara Ludewig, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Article + Full Text]

In his 1989 article “On the Idea of Permanence,” James M. O’Toole traces the history of the idea of permanence in the archival profession and offers reflections on the concept’s relevance to the field at the time of his writing. O’Toole points to the slipperiness of the term “permanent” but shows that it has been used “to fix [the] nature [of archival records] beyond doubt and to establish beyond challenge the full extent of the archivist’s responsibility to them” (p. 12). He points to the changing meaning of permanence over time and divides its history into four main historical categories before offering observations on the term in the practice of his day.

O’Toole begins by examining the concept of limited permanence in oral cultures, which rely chiefly on memory and oral traditions to preserve information over time. The advent of writing shifted the idea of permanence toward a more interminable meaning, as writing allows materials to be preserved for posterity in a tangible medium. As new technologies like printing emerged, the idea again shifted to focus on the permanence of information held within a document rather than the permanence of the original object itself. With the development of new scientific techniques in preservation, emphasis was again brought to the integrity and lasting nature of original documents.

O’Toole eventually lands on the decreasing relevance of permanence by the late 1980s, describing the decline of the idea of records of “permanent value” in favor of records of “intrinsic value”; lamenting the impact of this shift on conservation, appraisal, and accessioning practices, and speculating about the impact of new technologies on the term’s decline (p. 22). Overall, O’Toole paints a compelling picture of the way permanence has morphed and changed to encompass a variety of archival perspectives over time. Since O’Toole’s writing, the idea of permanence has continued to decline, disappearing from the archival lexicon almost completely. The Society of American Archivists’ Dictionary of Archives Terminology even contains a note in the entry for “permanent value” stating: “Many archivists do not describe archival collections as having permanent value . . . Rather, they see the archives as retaining records only as long as they have continuing or enduring value.”[1] An evaluation of changes in the field and the unique challenges that archivists currently face provides an explanation for this decline, as well as new understandings about the archivist’s responsibilities to collections and the people who created them. 

In the intervening thirty-six years since O’Toole’s research and musings on the idea of permanence, the field has changed greatly. The advent of new technologies has dramatically altered the archival science field. Institutions and individuals are now producing archival records in new formats, and technology offers new ways to preserve and protect both new and preexisting formats of archival records. The digital revolution has altered how archivists think about records and how we preserve them.[2]

Born-digital materials are now comprising a major part of archival collections. In 2012, the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives estimated that nearly 50 percent of the institution’s annual average accessions over the past ten years contained born-digital materials.[3] We can only assume that this number has radically increased over the past fourteen years, as records are now increasingly produced in fully digital environments. Digital materials offer new challenges, with changing file formats, operating systems, and software impacting the archivist’s ability to assess and process these materials. A 2024 roundtable discussion held by the OCLC Research Library Partnership revealed ongoing challenges in determining responsibility for digital content, developing digital preservation workflows, and addressing issues with funding and advocacy, and concluded that “this work is still very much in flux and actively being figured out, often with insufficient resources.”[4] Archivists are now wholly engaged in the complex work of arranging and describing digital records and finding creative ways to preserve digital materials despite a rapidly changing technological environment.

In light of these sweeping changes to the field, where does this leave us with the idea of permanence in the archival profession in 2026? In 1989, when describing the evolution away from using the term “permanence” in reference to archival holdings, O’Toole wrote: “the twentieth century is not a congenial climate for absolutes of any kind” (p. 23).If the twentieth century was not a congenial climate for absolutes, then the twenty-first century is even less so. The twenty-first century has seen the rise of several issues that undermine the concept of permanence.

Climate change renders our planet’s future uncertain and brings increased instances of floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters that directly impact archival institutions.[5] Our increasingly digital collections and subsequent reliance on technology and communication infrastructures with negative environmental impacts leads to issues of sustainability and tests our planet’s ability to maintain and support the environmental burden of digital preservation in perpetuity.[6] Archivists must ask how our digital preservation practices contribute to ecological unsustainability and balance preservation needs with environmental stewardship. As climate change accelerates, archival institutions also face the burden of preparing for increased natural disasters or they risk the extreme challenges of disaster recovery if they are caught unprepared.

Archival institutions are also increasingly plagued by issues of labor and funding. Already scarce financial support for archival work is dwindling and staffing levels are declining to match this trend, with many libraries and archives moving toward precarious models of temporary or term employment to save on costs.[7] As collecting initiatives maintain pace, archives and archivists struggle to keep up with the deluge of collections and to maintain a high standard of collections stewardship.[8] Without archival labor to acquire, process, and describe materials, the concept of permanence is called even further into question.

Finally, institutions that once seemed ironclad are faltering as government funding and the erosion of democracy threaten the security of institutions intended to preserve records in perpetuity.[9] In the United States, government institutions that were once stalwarts of archival funding and support have been slashed, impacting availability of grant and federal funding to smaller institutions.[10] As a result, institutions that were once thought to be secure places for indefinite storage and stewardship of archival materials are now far less stable.

Together, these forces converge to create a highly unstable archival atmosphere in the twenty-first century. With this tumultuous scene as the backdrop for current archival work, it is no wonder that the focus on permanence has continued to decline since O’Toole’s writing in 1989. Despite the uncertainty of the twenty-first century and the associated decline in the archival concept of permanence, archivists are facing the challenges of the profession head-on. As a result, we can take comfort in the efforts of archival professionals to creatively reshape archival work and redefine the relevance of permanence to its processes. 

In the realm of acquisitions and appraisal, archivists have continued to move away from selecting records of permanent value to instead focus on records of lasting value or of high research value.[11] In a profession, and a world, full of uncertainty, archivists have shifted to adopt a “good enough” or “doing the best we can” approach to permanence. Archivists and information professionals are engaging thoughtfully with OCLC’s “The Total Cost of Stewardship” to rethink how they might serve as strong collection stewards by decreasing acquisitions, spreading resources more judiciously, and achieving a middle ground for collection conservation.[12] This is a trend reflected in other elements of the archival profession, as processing moves from “slow processing” to a “more product, less process” (MPLP) approach.[13] The MPLP approach has expanded beyond analog materials to include digital preservation, allowing under-resourced cultural heritage institutions to balance the limited resources of time and money with progress toward preserving digital content.[14]

These efforts have also led to a renewed focus on the importance of reappraisal and deaccessioning to a collection’s lifecycle. While once the subject of hot debate, institutions and their archivists are now thoughtfully reexamining what materials their predecessors determined had permanent value and reassessing them in view of lasting value.[15] Reappraisal asks a variety of questions: Are these materials still relevant? Were we collecting these items at a time when budgets, labor, and world circumstances allowed a catchall approach to collecting? What institutions, communities, or individuals might provide these materials with a better home than we can currently provide? Reappraisal and deaccessioning are now common practices across a variety of archival institutions, and when conducted ethically and transparently they are essential tools in the archivist’s toolkit. In short, archivists have developed new paradigms for addressing (or rejecting) the idea of permanence in an uncertain world.  

But even as the twenty-first century sees a continued decline in the popularity of the concept of permanence, it also questions and brings new perspectives on the value of the concept of permanence to begin with. The fading of permanence from the professional parlance highlights the ways that the archival profession developed its founding principles and theories through a Western, colonial, male perspective. In describing the historical shift from permanence through oral traditions to permanence through written traditions, O’Toole cites Thomas Jefferson’s endorsement of printing to preserve information and the role of organizations like the American Antiquarian Society, emphasizing the centrality of white, Western institutions in the evolution of the concept. By viewing the value of archival records through the ever-evolving lens of permanence, early archivists and historians discounted cultures, societies, and groups that were not documented in writing, leaving out a multitude of stories in what they considered records of permanent value.[16]

Archives also often willfully disregarded their alleged allegiance to the concept of permanence in order to omit stories of abuse and violence, thus casting archivists in “the role of coconspirator in the violence.”[17] When archivists historically did include marginalized groups in their archives, they often did so in an extractive way. For example, Native American recordings and customs have historically been collected, in many instances through violence or coercion, by Western, colonial institutions, despite the protestations and subjugation of the communities of origin.[18] By emphasizing permanence, the archivist was historically often complicit in colonial violence and extraction and in the further marginalization of certain groups through lack of representation of diverse cultures and traditions in the archives.

As we reexamine the idea of permanence in the face of the unique set of challenges brought on by the twenty-first century, archivists are increasingly asking the following questions: How and what collections have historically been preserved in perpetuity? How do bias and violence impact what was once considered to have permanent value? How do bias and violence continue to impact what is currently considered to have archival value? Do communities of origin even want their collections to be considered to have permanent value?

This has led to new paradigms and ethical standards in archives, with a focus on repatriation of Native American collection materials and an emphasis on community archiving and the importance of keeping materials within their community of origin.[19] These new directions in the field indicate that permanence was never a just or useful concept to begin with, and that archival practices for reappraisal and retention need to consider the well-being of communities and do no further harm in the process. Today’s archivist is much more willing to acknowledge the way their own biases and decisions about lasting value, intrinsic value, or permanent value have impacted and continue to impact who and what is represented in our archives. By moving away from the concept of permanence, archives assume greater responsibility toward their collections and the people who created these collections.

So, what are we, as archivists, to make of the further decline of the relevance of permanence to the archival profession? Are we all experiencing a professional existential crisis brought on by what O’Toole might argue is the unfulfillment of our “basic human impulses” in a world where “permanence is devoid of meaning” (p. 25)? I would argue that without permanence as a central concept, the profession is not wandering without a compass, lost in our own existential dread. Rather, to be an archivist, and even just a human, in the twenty-first century requires accepting this uncertainty. It means doing the best you can with limited resources, working to change those circumstances as much as you are able, and accepting that some things are just lost to history. It is about trying to save what you are able and to strive for some modicum of justice and moderation through your archival choices. If that means rejecting the idea of permanence in the process, so be it—it was never that permanent of a concept anyway.  

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[1] “Permanent Value,” Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/permanent-value.html. A perusal of the sources cited by the Society of American Archivists in the creation of the Dictionary of Archives Terminology entry further demonstrates the decline in the term permanence. While entries for “enduring value” and “continuing value” have citations for articles written between 1973 and 2015, the entry for “permanent value” only contains citations for articles written between 1956 and 1996. Although not a definitive listing of sources on the subject, the fact that the most recent citation on this list is from nearly thirty years ago is telling. See “Enduring Value,” Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/enduring-value.html; and “Continuing Value,” Dictionary of Archives Terminology, https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/continuing-value.html.

[2] Philip C. Bantin, “Strategies for Managing Electronic Records: A New Archival Paradigm? An Affirmation of Our Archival Traditions?” Archival Issues 23, no. 1 (1998): https://doi.org/10.31274/archivalissues.10863; Bethany Anderson, Fynnette Eaton, and Scott W. Schwartz, “Archival Appraisal and the Digital Record: Applying Past Tradition for Future Practice,” New Review of Information Networking 20(2015): https://doi.org/10.1080/13614576.2015.1114823.   

[3] “About the Project,” Born Digital Access Project (BDAP), Smithsonian Institution Archives, https://siarchives.si.edu/what-we-do/digital-curation/born-digital-access-project#:~:text=About%20the%20Project,System%20(OAIS)%20Reference%20Model.  

[4] Chela Scott Weber, “Advocacy, Capacity, and Program Building: Stewarding Born-Digital Archival Collections in the RLP,” Hanging Together: The OCLC Research Blog, April 1, 2024, https://hangingtogether.org/advocacy-capacity-and-program-building-stewarding-born-digital-archival-collections-in-the-rlp/. 

[5] Eira Tansey, A Green New Deal for Archives, Council of Library and Information Resources, July 2023, https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/a-green-new-deal-for-archives/; Adele Wessell and Clare Thorpe, “Keeping the Archives Above Water: Preserving Regional Heritage in Times of Accelerated Climate Change,” Archival Science 23 (2023): 615, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-023-09424-8.

[6] Keith L. Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tessa Walsh, and Laura Alagna, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” American Archivist 82, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2019): 166–67, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165.  

[7] Courtney Dean et al., “Creating Ethical Temporary Positions in Archives: Best Practices and Case Studies,” Council on Library and Information Resources, December 2024, https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/creating-ethical-temporary-positions-in-archives/. 

[8] Chela Scott Weber et al., “Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections,” OCLC Research Report, 2021, https://doi.org/10.25333/zbh0-a044.

[9] Michael Dezuanni, Kim Osman, Elizabeth Heck, and Alexander Burton, “IFLA Trend Report 2024: Facing the Future of Information with Confidence,” International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2024, https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/3496. 

[10] Mark Treskon, “Cutting Federal Grants to Libraries and Museums Will Weaken Communities and Endanger Our Heritage,” Urban Wire, April 22, 2025, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/cutting-federal-grants-libraries-and-museums-will-weaken-communities-and-endanger-our; Steve Runge, “Why Cuts to the IMLS Matter,” Boston College Libraries News, April 7, 2025, https://library.bc.edu/newsletter/why-cuts-to-the-imls-matter/.

[11] Richard J. Cox and Helen W. Samuels, “The Archivist’s First Responsibility: A Research Agenda to Improve the Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring Value,” American Archivist 51, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1988): 29–32, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.51.1-2.gkw67424l3344ug8; Michelle Light, “A Brief History of Archival Appraisal, in Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts, ed. Audra Eagle Yun and Chela Scott Weber (Chicago, IL: Society of American Archivists Press, 2025); Kate Dundon, Stephanie E. Bennett, and Jasmine Larkin, “More Than a Project: Case Studies on the Practice of Retrospective Accessioning,” American Archivist 88, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2025): 86, https://doi.org/10.17723/2327-9702-88.1.78.  

[12] Weber et al., “Total Cost of Stewardship.”

[13] Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” American Archivist 68, no. 2(Fall/Winter 2005): 208–63, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.68.2.c741823776k65863.

[14] Jaime Schumacher et al., “From Theory to Action: ‘Good Enough’ Digital Preservation Solutions for Under-Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions,” A Digital POWRR White Paper for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, August 2014, 14–15, https://sustainableheritagenetwork.org/digital-heritage/theory-action-%E2%80%9Cgood-enough%E2%80%9D-digital-preservation-solutions-under-resourced-cultural.   

[15] Marcella Huggard and Laura Uglean Jackson, “Practices in Progress: The State of Reappraisal and Deaccessioning in Archives,” American Archivist 82, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2019): 508–47, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-04; Mark A. Greene, “I’ve Deaccessioned and Lived to Tell About It: Confessions of an Unrepentant Reappraiser,” Archival Issues 30, no. 1 (2006): 7–22, https://doi.org/10.31274/archivalissues.10946; Dundon, Bennett, and Larkin, “More Than a Project.”

[16] Terry Cook, “‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 32,no. 2 (October 2011): 174–75, 182–83, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00379816.2011.619688; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).

[17] Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5, no. 1 (2018): 1, Article 6, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6. For more on archival silences and colonial violence see Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, “Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery,” English Language Notes 59, no. 1 (April 2021): 222–24, https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-8815104; and Katharine Gerbner, “Archival Violence, Archival Capital: Ethics, Inheritance, and Reparations in the Thistlewood Diaries,” The William and Mary Quarterly 79, no. 4 (October 2022): 595–624, https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2022.0050.  

[18] Jennifer R. O’Neal, “‘The Right to Know’: Decolonizing Native American Archives,” Journal of Western Archives 6, no. 1 (2015): 4–7, Article 2, https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol6/iss1/2.  

[19] Andrew Flinn, Mary Stevens, and Elizabeth Shepherd, “Whose Memories, Whose Archives? Independent Community Archives, Autonomy and the Mainstream,” Archival Science 9(2009): Article 71, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-009-9105-2; O’Neal, “‘The Right to Know’”; Kimberly Christen, “Opening Archives: Respectful Repatriation,” American Archivist 74, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 185–210, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.74.1.4233nv6nv6428521.