Back to the Future of Library History

The history of the archive is perhaps the most important recent development in library history, one that (again) I did not foresee in 2003. In that year iCHORA (the International Conference on the History of Records and Archives) held its first meeting (in Toronto). The Archival History Section of the Society of American Archivists has been active since 1986. There is really no excuse for my oversight, because as a professional historian, I live in archives. Yet I did not fully grasp that archives too have a history. No institutional memory is possible without archives, and those memories are shaped by what archivists choose to preserve, hide, or destroy. Therefore, we should recognize that the history of archives is the foundation of all fields of historical investigation. Doctoral students in history should probably be required to take a course in this area, ideally in their first semester. There is as yet no scholarly journal specifically devoted to archival history, but articles on the subject do appear frequently in archival studies periodicals and in Book History. Given that "the history of the book" is defined as the history of all written and printed documents and that library history deals with the storage and circulation of those documents (and sometimes their concealment or elimination), both of these disciplines should offer a home to archival historians.