I struggle a bit with the spiritual tone taken earlier in this article but the case study helped me contextualize the points being made here. It reminds me of an article we read in my Foundations class about librarians as hospitality workers. I see the same thing here, where archivists working with dying donors have certain duties and responsibilities centered on providing care, comfort, and clarity to the people seeking their help. Emphasizing the human element of these interactions and preparing for them as best you can is important so that you can properly serve. I don't know that anyone can fully brace themself for the actual emotions these situations create, but building a framework and giving advice is much more useful than ignoring the topic altogether.

This article was written in 2001, so I'm interested to learn about how competition between archival institutions has changed with the advent of the Internet. Someone still needs to have possession of discrete physical items, but if archival resources can be digitized and reproduced, does that limit the need for competition? I'm also curious about how digital archiving impacts collection development policies. I would guess that they become more necessary because institutions need to be able to state whether they take digital resources and how they're handled. However, I could be underestimating the human drive to wing it.

I would be interested to read further literature discussing this phenomenon in considering archival studies. Archivists tend to lack a full form in the social consciousness in comparison to more evident professionals like nurses and educators, so while I think this observation is sound it also feels centered around academia rather than society as a whole. That said, the points about "practical professions" being feminized and having theoretical contributions undercut as a result speaks to what I view as a broader problem in academia. Fields that are fundamentally concerned with "doing a job" are seen as disconnected from the big theoretical disciplines (hard science, social science, humanities,etc.) because they arose out of specific human practices rather than branching off from those theoretical disciplines.

(I remember we only need to do one post, I'm doing an additional one because I had thoughts I wanted to express) It seems to me that the early focuses on truth, impartiality, purity, etc. especially as they relate to the history of a nation are indicative of a sort of imperialist, or just broadly nationalist approach to record keeping. The concept of a pure truth that is muddied by human inadequacies seems tied to other scientific movements of the time like eugenics. It feels like a weird comparison to make, but you see the common thread of logic drawn from evolutionary theory and various industrial philosophies: Humans are flawed, thus we must erase the fallible parts of humanity so that there is only the most rational and advantageous parts left. It's interesting to see how much archival theory was dominated by a similar approach until the material impracticality forced a change in perspective.

I'm interested by this approach to archivists as a distinct community, separate from an outside world whose records they keep. I get how it works for this paper on a rhetorical level, to help talk about the field and its aims in the same way that we talk about the communities it serves, but I think it ignores the fact that archivists are also human beings that exist within other communities. You can't decontextualize an archivist from the society around them simply because they're an archivist. I don't think this is necessarily what the author is arguing, but setting up the discussion of future possibilities for the profession by framing archivists as distinct from the people they serve limits how archivists can envision themselves. If we want an actually effective paradigm or framework to consider archival work, we should try to move away from seeing The Archive as an apparatus that exists separately from the information it stores.