IN DEPTH
Accidental Archives – Lost letters of a medical student
The role of the institutional archivist should look for the personal stories among collections to preserve the vanishing documents of ordinary lives, says Garfield Lam, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Hong Kong. Here he explores who these can help to fill in the gaps for researchers.
RESEARCHERS and the general public are increasingly drawn to social and genealogical history, which often uses statistical analysis in conjunction with the documentary record to explore the lives of ordinary people, especially in minority groups. Institutional archivists should therefore expand the collection of documentary records by capturing more institutional related collective memories through strategic acquisition, in-depth appraisal, community outreach and wider, inter-institution reference techniques.
Special efforts are necessary to obtain those less available, vanishing records documenting the lives of ordinary people, in written and oral forms. As genealogists increasingly turn to institutional archives,1
finding and collecting
records, especially personal papers, from other sources helps fill the gaps.
Personal records associated with institutions offer a broader understanding of communities by revealing the personal narratives hidden behind the institutional facade. These stories are historical and valuable in intent because they offer richer insights into the past from the perspective of the community, or institutional members. Archives are records with sensitiv- ity, secrecy, confidentiality, and power, and “disclosures are generally couched in terms of
42 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Garfield Lam (
kfglam@hku.hk), University Archivist, Head of Archives and Special Collections, University of Hong Kong, Executive Bureau Member of ICA-SUV.
the ceding of power and acknowledgement of rights from the top-down and empowerment and the exercise of rights from the bot- tom-up”.2
Collecting loose, personal records allows for enhancement or corrections to the collection gaps found in many traditional institutional archives, where powerful voices are ampli- fied and the voices of others often remain unheard.3
These records can provide per- sonalised accounts of events and fulfil the ideological mission of archives and archivists – to include the voices of under-represented groups in the historical records.4
Archivists
can help build a more balanced and “culturally relevant records repository” while enabling
June 2024
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