Susan Crean's National Archives Blues: Has this national institution lost its way?

The Literary Review of Canada publishes an interesting an important essay by Susan Crean (and leaves her byline off the  Web version) about an important institution in Canada's cultural life: Library and Archives Canada. Some excerpts:

The biggest pressure, however, comes from the digital revolution, which has transformed the world of documentary production—and with it the work of archivists—while irrevocably changing public expectations. Digital access is now seen as a quasi right and digitization as a means of mass democratization. So it is no surprise that this has become the central preoccupation of LAC and has apparently led to a radical reassessment of its purpose. In a speech to the Association of Canadian Archivists last June the new chief archivist Daniel Caron [Caron's speeches are online here but this speech is not there – Akin] —the first chief archivist not to have a degree in history, but rather a PhD in economics—spoke of the “public memory monopoly once exercised by archives,” bemoaning the fact that the “documentary moment” in the analogue world is hopelessly long. Archivists are lost “within an anachronistic time and space,” he contends, noting that in the age of self-documentation, information needs to be ubiquitous, instant and unmediated.

In late 2009, Caron also released a set of “Modernization Papers” addressing the challenge of digitization within LAC. These are strategic planning documents, largely concerned with “management process” and written in a style that eschews description and the active voice. As a result, there is no sense of the archives as a living institution and participant in the intellectual life of the country.

…

On a broader, more philosophic level, the notion of digitization as an agent of equality needs a bit of scrutiny. Contrary to the rhetoric, it is not really value-free. Databases are like maps; they are ­representations of reality and similarly model a set of relationships, for example between author and title and language (or land and water and altitude), which means that selection is always involved.

… Digitization is no guarantee of access, either. Far from being more accessible I experienced LAC as having disappeared behind its website and into a fog of MBA speak. The site is not for neophytes; it assumes you know what a fonds is, and what a MIKAN number is for, and that the accession number is likely to be the search key, which is fair enough. But where are the glossary and FAQs for those who do not know?