Most occupations — the transport industry, the financial sector, the medical profession, the emergency services — involve trying to overcome the shortness of time. But others also have to cope with time's sheer magnitude: for history has shown us that there is rather a lot of it! The archival profession numbers among these. If some records are made to be kept, and if they are to outlive our era and last long into many others, then we must ready our records, and their context, to survive decades and centuries. And information is such a fragile thing.
This has been the week of the annual Explore Your Archive campaign, which promotes archives and their holdings to the public. Hopefully it is not a mere coincidence that it fell around the feast day (Friday 25th November) of St Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of archivists (among others), and the ranks of whose petitioners I have joined this year. St Catherine, pleading the cause of all archivists as they wrestle with the past, for the sake of the future, in the narrow window of the present, ora pro nobis! And deliver us from ninety-year-old sellotape.
This has been the week of the annual Explore Your Archive campaign, which promotes archives and their holdings to the public. Hopefully it is not a mere coincidence that it fell around the feast day (Friday 25th November) of St Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of archivists (among others), and the ranks of whose petitioners I have joined this year. St Catherine, pleading the cause of all archivists as they wrestle with the past, for the sake of the future, in the narrow window of the present, ora pro nobis! And deliver us from ninety-year-old sellotape.
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| St Catherine of Alexandria, Ventura Salimbeni (1567-1613). From the Wikimedia Commons. |
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