Selection is arguably the most important and at the same time the most difficult of all the activities of the archivist, curator or librarian, especially those dealing with audiovisual materials. It is an essential element of the archival process and imposes a discipline on the collector almost from the beginning. A collector may not normally consider selection immediately, but the very consideration of what to collect or how wide a range of material one includes in a collection is one of the first principles of selection.
As individuals we are constantly making selection in everyday life, and most of our everyday decisions are forms of selection - shall we take one course or another; go here or there; work, rest or play. Decisions are taken almost unconsciously according to whim or circumstance. But selection takes decision making much further than this. It is usually based on a set of principles or guidelines although such principles may never have been itemised.
Collectors of sound recordings may have their own predilections or whims and this is not to denigrate their purposes, for without collectors there may never have been the basis for libraries and archives of materials.
However collections grow and very soon some process of selection, or discarding becomes necessary. The very volume of the production of sound recordings begins to demand a selection process and this is the point at which problems begin to be apparent.
The collector may be working within his own parameters of cost and space and it is his own decision as to what is kept and what is disposed of by exchange, sale or destruction. Others may question his decisions but are not in any position to criticise unless they do something positive to assist in the retention or preservation of the collection in part or whole.
Where the archivist (and for archivist one should read archivist/librarian in the context of this introduction) meets his problem is in the sensitive area of selection. A collector can be subjective in his approach, but an archivist should be seen to be objective and a selection policy or set of principles is needed here to provide a framework for collection.
The volume of output makes selection inevitable. As well as the commercial production of the recording industry we have a large non-commercial output and the output of oral historians and broadcasting output where far more material is recorded that transmitted and the unedited, untransmitted material may be potentially valuable for later usage. Specialized subject collections may also contain recorded material or the archivist may have conducted interviews, which have been edited down for public access purposes, but the unedited material has its own value. Following from this argument we might also consider one area often overlooked, which is selection at the point of origin. The recordist or sound archivist who initiates a recording needs to reflect on why he has to record this material, at what length he should be doing so, whether or not he should edit the recording and then dispose of the material which is superfluous to the recording he intended or his present requirements.
Selection has been made even more imperative as a result of the increased ease of recording. As tape recording has become easier and the equipment less cumbersome more and more recording is made possible by a greater variety of people. No longer is it the sole province of a technician to record material for preservation purposes. With improvements in equipment and ease of handling such equipment to produce acceptable recordings, more and more people are recording material which can be regarded as a useful record.
The real purpose of selection is to reduce an archive or collection to manageable proportion. The plethora of information and material can quickly get out of hand and unless selection principles are used we are in danger of sinking without trace in a tangle of magnetic tape, under a sea of books, cassettes, videodiscs or computer software. Worse we might disappear altogether into the computer hardware in search of that elusive piece of data, which was not properly labelled.
And herein lies another powerful argument for selection. If we do not select with reasonable care then what is the point of spending resources of time and money documenting, storing and preserving material, which is not of archival value?
Indeed it is a dereliction of our duty as information providers, whether archivists, librarians or information scientists not to select the material for preservation and future use. Too much information can be as difficult to handle as too little – it is equally difficult to access and discover the material, which would be most useful. The idea that you can, with the aid of modern technology, store everything easily on those convenient little cassettes appeals to the research worker, but how on earth does he think you are going to access a roomful, and it has been expressed in that very term, of video-cassettes and audiocassettes, each cassette bearing up to 3 or worse 6 hours of material, not necessarily in edited form. The research worker forgets that someone has to expend effort and time entering the information on to the database in a retrievable or accessible order.
There are inevitable constraints placed on any archive, which make it necessary to adopt selection policies. These constraints may be basic and arbitrary ones such as space for storage or the high cost of storage, or they may be constraints imposed by the available resources in terms of people and time as well as financial resources to prepare the material for storage, conservation and subsequent access.
As stated already, but always worth repeating, archives are not simply repositories. Some form of records management is essential to impose an order upon the record and make it manageable and accessible to future users of the archive, whether these users are researchers, browsers, those with a commercial concern to reuse the material or interested members of the general public.
Records management is about human resources. Without management of the record and the intervention of people the repository of sound recordings would probably deteriorate and certainly it would become difficult to locate particular items or groups of items within a very short space of time. There is of course merit in acquiring as much material as possible in a particular field of interest, especially in the early stages of development of a collection, but once acquired it is bad practice to leave such materials in an unordered state. The archivist has a responsibility to the material itself as well as his “user”. The material needs processing, filing in a retrievable order, conservation, and some form of information retrieval, however basic, should be imposed upon it as soon as possible after acquisition.
Selection may be a more leisurely process, but it is nevertheless a necessary one and should at least be considered from the outset. It need not happen immediately, but with any volume of material the need for it will quickly become apparent.
Archivists are not simply store-keepers. They must impose a discipline of management on their collections, and one of the more important disciplines will be the selection process. Selection, like management, is not an exact science. If it were then the archivist might have exact criteria and theorems to guide him. Nor do I believe that selection is an art. It can be argued as more of an art than a science, but I would prefer to consider selection as a craft, practised to achieve certain ends with suitable criteria or guidelines to meet these ends.
If the first principle of selection is to reduce the collection to manageable proportions, the purpose of selection is to ensure a balanced, representative collection of material relevant to the nature of the subject matter of the archive concerned. This means different archives will have different selection policies according to the intended use of the collection. Selecting material within areas of interest of the individual archive immediately raises the question of what is in the field of interest and what is outside? There will, almost inevitably, be grey areas where the material could be considered of use to the archive in conjunction with the rest of the collection. Rigid criteria are thus going to be of little use to the archivist; criteria must be flexible and try to take account of the related areas of interest.
Given the guiding principle that selection is of necessity one of the first major concerns of the archivist it will be necessary to establish who it is who is to select the material and then formulate the criteria for selection. Let us start with who is to select the material deposited in the archive. Some archives have selection staff who concentrates on the areas of acquisition and selection. Some archives use a system of selection committees, usually an ‘ad hoc’ arrangement whereby committee members are made aware of likely items of interest, or debate the merits from a listing supplied by archive staff. Such systems normally depend on the subsequent availability of the material and cost of acquisition. A lot of material escapes the net by this method of selection, but it does nod in the direction of consultation.
But is selection by consultation and committee necessarily a good thing? It is fraught with difficulty when sectional interests appear and squabbles break out between people from different disciplines. A short piece paraphrased from a book on Archive Administration written in 1922 by Hilary Jenkinson serves to make the point;
“The archivist is concerned to keep materials intact for the future use of students working upon subjects which neither he nor any one else has contemplated. The archivist’s work is that of conservation and his interest in his archives as archives, not as documents valuable for proving this or that thesis. How then is he to make judgments and choices on matters, which may not be his personal concern? If the archivist cannot be of use, can we not appeal to the historian - he may seem the obvious person to undertake such a task. As soon, however, as the historian’s claims in this connection are investigated it becomes clear that the choice of him as arbiter of the fate of archives is at least as open to criticism as that of the archivist. Must he not be regarded, where his own subject is concerned, as a person particularly liable to prejudice? Surely there will always remain the suspicion that in deciding upon a policy of archive conservation he favoured those archive classes, which furthered his own special line of inquiry. The very fact that a historian is known to have selected for an archive is fatal to its impartiality”.
Some of the more curious suggestions about retention of material, which have been encountered, come from eminent people in their own fields who want everything kept ‘in case they need to study it’. Why do they want to study it? Uncharitably we could suggest in order to select information for the benefit of the rest of us, but more seriously any archivist would wonder that they have the unlimited time at their disposal which is needed to sit through hundreds of hours of material.
It would appear that selection should be done by the archivist or librarian and not by outsiders with peccadilloes and sectional interests. Specially appointed staff in the archive can see the wider implications and, if thoroughly versed in the aims and objectives of the particular archive, are in a good position to select. But to be effective they must be carefully chosen and they should have a set of criteria to work with.
The purpose of this publication is to indicate possible criteria for selection in different archives. There are several governing principles, which should be considered before guidelines can be enumerated.
These principles are not of course criteria for selection, but they include many of the considerations the archivist should take into account in formulating his own criteria for selection.
The rest of this publication will expand and elucidate many of these principles and indicate how practice and practical considerations affect them.
The criteria for selection of sound recordings have not been, and indeed cannot be laid down as hard-and-fast rules, but it is hoped that the readers of the book will find many practical examples and working principles in the pages which follow; examples of criteria used in different types of archive with particular purposes which will assist the profession of sound archivists to arrive at reasoned, practical criteria for selecting material to store in archives for passing on to future generations.
IASA has recognised that selection is a central area of the archivist’s concern and this series of papers exists to continue the debate about criteria or guidelines for selection; a debate which may rumble on for some time. In highlighting the problems we can only hope that our successors will recognise that we took notice of an obligation to select, and even if they may quibble over what was selected or destroyed, will be grateful for the production of more manageable archives.
Helen Harrison is the Media Librarian at the Open University in England. This paper is an extended version of the brief Chairman’s introduction given at the IASA conference in Budapest, 1981.