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Respondent
Ms Catriona Crowe, Archivist
Recovering Archival Futures Ms Catriona Crowe Catriona Crowe, Uasal
My thanks to the President for inviting me to be part of Machnamh, a thoughtful, reflective set of explorations of vital issues during our Decade of Centenaries, valuable in so many ways, particularly when an unnatural pause for thought has been imposed by Covid-19 and the attendant closure of archives and libraries. The theme for this session of Machnamh is “Recovering Imagined Futures”. We are living out, at present, a fundamental disruption to our various imagined futures by a world-historical event, a global pandemic, which has wiped out the actual futures of millions of people around the world, and created futures dogged by illhealth, unemployment and poverty for millions more. It gives us some idea of how a war-weary Europe must have felt in 1918 when the flu pandemic arrived to destroy so many fragile imagined futures.
I have been an archivist for most of my working life. Archivists deal with the imagined futures of documents, many of them now electronic and in some peril. We have to imagine the potential futures of these documents in terms of their usefulness to scholars, genealogists and increasingly, to the general public. These emphases have changed over time to include new disciplines like social, gender, cultural and labour history, and archivists have to try to keep pace with these disciplines, and to remember that the material we deem worthy of preservation now may have many uses in the future that we cannot now imagine. The raw materials of huge statistical record sets like census records have become much more important over the last forty years, as family history has become an absorbing study for many individuals and scholars; the records were created to provide a statistical base for understanding trends in population, occupation, household composition, living conditions and education.
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