Dear Georgen Gilliam

This subject has fascinated me for some years. I came to it from the
perspective of an archivist, wrestling with the problem of how the field of
'archivy' can promote itself by making common cause with one or more of its
(generally much stronger and better-recognised) cognates, without being
hijacked and carried off towards a destination dictated by the various
rather different agendae of these cognates.

Another metaphor which I have used is that of little 'Archivy' as a sort of
Poland surrounded by larger states with fluctuating imperialist tendencies,
who periodically trample over it and shove it this way and that, showing
very little understanding of or sympathy for its distinct culture and
destiny - or raison d'etre. And with this goes a good deal of civil
disputation and warfare over the pros and cons of various collaborationist
and separatist policies.

The cognates include - besides museology and librarianship - current records
management, historiography, archaeology, materials conservation and
information management. The cross-cutting nature of its relations to each of
these - combined with its positioning at an awkward interface of government,
business and bureaucracy with heritage conservation, public history and
academia - makes for endless debating of perennial unresolvable issues. It
is like turning a kaleidoscope. One sees new patterns with each reshuffling
of the pieces of the puzzle.

Or, to invoke yet another metaphor - archivy has a chameleon-like quality -
taking colour from whichever context it happens to be relating to at the
moment in the case in question.

I wrote a paper which was incidentally about this. Its focus was on the
question of where our best political propects lay, and the lessons of
several decades of Australian experience of trying to hitch rides with
various cognates. It used yet another metaphor, being entitled "A
Hitch-hiker's Guide to Australian Archival History" and addressed in its
introduction to the problems of "an unregarded little proto-profession,
orbiting in the unfashionable sphere of documentation and records
management, down at the less glamorous end of the information economy. Or is
it the outer limits of the conservation and heritage movement? Or both?". I
remember that by the time I'd finished working and reworking it I was pretty
sick of the bloody metaphor - and when  I tried to re-read it last night I
felt rather less surprised that formerly that no-one has ever evinced much
understanding of what I was trying to say.

It was published - to my annoyance, without several maps of the universe
over which I had laboured - in a collection of papers to which it scarcely
related - Sue McKemmish & Frank Upward (eds) "Archival Documents. Providing
Accountability Through Recordkeeping" Ancora Press, Melbourne, Australia
1993 - ISBN 0-86862-017-3 - Number 3 in a series called "Monash Occasional
Papers in Librarianship, Recordkeeping and Bibliography". As the editors and
their school at Monash University have had a lot of contact with their
opposite numbers in North America in recent years, I expect you would be
able to find the book somewhere in the US library network.