Guarding Against Collective Amnesia? Making Significance Problematic: An Exploration of Issues

Lloyd, Annemaree

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/3779 Copy

Description

Title

Guarding Against Collective Amnesia? Making Significance Problematic: An Exploration of Issues

Author(s)

Lloyd, Annemaree

Issue Date

2007

Keyword(s)

Appraisal

Abstract

A nation’s collective consciousness relies on the traces of memory collected by institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums. Such institutions have a responsibility to preserve documents and objects that reflect individual and collective endeavors and that have had an impact on culture and society at national, regional, and local levels. Institutions need to assess documents and objects against criteria that, in effect, “name” these items as significant. Most institutions claim that this process is objective, failing to acknowledge that it is underpinned by ideological, political, economic, cultural, and social influences. The position adopted in this paper is that the process of naming a document or object as significant will always reflect the directions and consciousness of a society’s dominant groups, and that this will shape interpretations and narratives of the past. Thus the voices of a community’s minority or special interest groups will be silenced. This paper suggests that neither the concept of significance nor the process of assessing significance is benign; both should be seen as areas of tension and contestation.

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

ISSN

0024-2594

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3779

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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