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Documentary editors seldom take note of archival practice though they have much in common with archivists. Both must confront the formidable task of controlling, in one way or another, thousands upon thousands of documents. Authorship and dates of documents must be ascertained, documents have to be filed in some sort of chronological order, and indexes (of cards or in computer data bases) must be constructed to provide access to the "collection."
One would think then that editors and archivists would hold in common some general approaches and principles, but this has not happened. For example, although Mary Jo Kline in her A Guide to Documentary Editing advises in her chapter on document control: "if the editor is not an archivist or rare books librarian by training, he must learn the rudiments of these professions," she fails to mention such commonplace terms in the archival world as Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, MARC AMC, or "authority work." But then again, Dr. Kline, through her methodology of finding out how various documentary projects operate, merely reflects the standard practice of editors.[1]
The different goals of editors and archivists to some extent account for the distance separating their practices. Editors must control individual documents rarely numbering beyond the thousands while most archivists must deal with collections that often consist of millions of documents. The few archivists who control individual documents are sometimes deemed by the profession, not entirely charitably, "antiquarians." Editors, as their name implies, have always been guided by the need to produce an edition and not so directly by the archivist's goal of preserving manuscripts and rare printed materials from the vicissitudes of time. Editors aim to disseminate their work to a much wider audience than the relatively small number of hearty researchers who in person besiege archivists each year.
Ironically, archivists themselves for a long time followed few common standards. Archivists generally observed the dictum to "let the nature of the collection determine the principles used to organize it." Though the resulting, often surreal bevy of organizational strategies frustrate many researchers today, they have by and large worked well enough and have often graced the task of archival research with a certain quaint charm. On the other hand, the archivist's cherished principle of respect des fonds has often preserved the
While the arrival of the age of electronic information storage and retrieval has not changed the way archivists organize their collections, it has dramatically altered how they store information about these holdings. The format of such information must be standardized in order to permit easy retrieval and, eventually, storage on-line in a national data base of manuscript holdings. Since the early 1980's such standardization has increasingly drawn the attention of archivists, swelling the numbers at Society of American Archivist sessions devoted to computerization.[2]
Standardization problems in automation have come slightly later and with less force to documentary editing. Most projects have used the computer for word processing rather than controlling documents. A study funded by the Office of Scholarly Communication and Technology found that as late as 1986 only 17 of 53 humanities projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities used computers to create data bases. Yet documentary editors have been publicly speaking out for the "possibility of pooling information from editorial projects in data bases" since as early as 1981. With time as scholarly data bases become more widely available and with the eventual acceptance of CD ROM storage, such centralized data bases for documentary editions will become feasible. But only those documentary editing projects which have taken the time to address the issue of archival standardization will be able to contribute to such data bases. Ironically, projects without computers which have adopted standard cataloging rules will be more likely to go on-line (thanks to the rising generation of hand-held scanners) than will many of the projects with computerized data bases in incompatible formats.[3]
In short, documentary editors should begin now to evaluate adopting archival standards to assure that their work will be able to meet tomorrow's demand for computerized access to information. As a first step in this analysis, four central topics of archival standardization will be discussed here: cataloging rules, the MARC AMC format, authority work, and subject indexing. The applicability of these standards to the peculiar needs of documentary editing will be addressed, based upon the experiences of the Emma Goldman Papers, a project which has striven to adhere to at least some of these standard practices.[4]
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