Use of archives by social scientists

I have just attended two seminars as part of a project on Archiving and Reusing Qualitative Data: Theory, Methods and Ethics Across Disciplines. They provided a great deal of food for thought, as seminars like this so often do. These seminars were particularly valuable because they drew together academics, particularly social scientists and archivists. Many of the participants were oral historians, and the challenges of oral history ran through many of the talks.

When archivists think about archival theory and description, they are generally thinking about archives as materials ‘created by an individual or organisation in the course of their life or work and considered worthy of permanent preservation’ (my quotes, to indicate that this is a classic definition of archives). But if we think about archives as any records considered worthy of preservation and with value for future researchers, then we can expand the definition to include records that social scientists refer to as archives. For them, archives are often data sets, created by researchers in the course of their research and then, possibly, reused.

Social scientists do not necessarily think in terms of business records or personal letters, or archives as a reflection of personal or organisational activity. They think in terms of longitudinal studies and oral histories; quantitative and qualitative data. These are archives that generally are created for the purposes of research, and so the perspective is rather different to those created in the course of individual or organisational activity. We have the UK Data Archive which has ‘the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the UK’, and this houses the History Data Service which ‘promotes the use of digital resources, which result from or support historical research, learning and teaching’, but I don’t think that there is a general sense amongst archivists that these are part of the archive community, in the sense that trainee archivists don’t really think about working for a data archive, and arhcival theory doesn’t appear to really encompass this type of archive. Certainly social scientists clearly see archives as both data archives (data sets) and traditional archives (archives as reflections of past activity), and the fact that the two were not explicitly distinguished during the seminars was striking in itself.

It may be that data archives require different ways of thinking to ‘historical archives’, in terms of how they are organised and managed, but now that archives are increasingly digital, and as all archives are a valuable source for research, surely there is sense in the two communities moving closer together?