“Real” and “Invented Archives

Be they public or private, archives tend to make little effort to make the materials they contain available online. This is a problem which effects all branches of historical study, not just the history of education.

Even the most innovative of archives do no more than the more innovative libraries, limiting themselves to publishing their catalogues online.

Although publishing catalogues does at least enable researchers to determine whether or not the documentation sought is present in the archive, they are nonetheless subsequently obliged to be physically present in the archive in question if they wish to consult the material of interest.

As always, there are a few exceptions which prove the rule. Together with publishing their catalogues online, these archives also provide electronic format copies of selected documents.

The selection criteria determining which documents are to be published is not always well-defined.

These online publications naturally derive principally from the larger, national archives, which frequently digitalise texts of pedagogical interest. Thus, for example, the Archives Publiques de l’Ontario have published an online exhibition entitled Devoirs et leçons: L'histoire de l'éducation en Ontario⁴⁴.

The prints, photographs, legal texts and films published trace the history of the Ontario school system from the mid-nineteenth century too the present day.

The picture as far as private archives are concerned is, generally speaking, far bleaker. Even specialised archives rarely publish more than one digitalised page per document online.

Were these archives to publish more materials online, they would solve many of their funding problems, saving a great deal of the money required to keep archive resources open and accessible.

Real archives, then, provide only a limited degree of assistance to those undertaking historical research in general and research into the history of education in particular.

To compensate for this lack, educational historians have begun preparing alternative resources.
 

Such endeavours are still at an experimental stage so far, but their results are already noteworthy.
 

The first such initiative is the already-mentioned Service d’histoire de l’éducation dell’INRP, which provides an extensive list of online resources on its website⁴⁵.

They provide some invaluable sources for reconstructing the history of education in France from the mid-1700s to nowadays.

They provide access to a list of the names of those elected to the agrégation from 1821 to 1950, the image published in French language textbooks owned by INRP 1750 to 1834, the inventory of teaching manuals published from the sixteenth to the twentieth century contained in French libraries and archives, together with the already-mentioned biographical data base of ministers for education and the Emmanuelle database of school textbooks.

The material in question was not particularly collected to be made available online.

It rather bears witness to the work under way and already completed by the academics responsible. In some cases, it represents a sort of virtual appendix to works which have been at least partially completed and are under review or in print.

For this reason, the databases are rarely well-organised and the data is normally published in the form of html tables.

Research fields are therefore limited. Notwithstanding this, the value of the resources offered is beyond doubt. Each archival or printed source is given in precise detail.

Every section is closely followed by an expert and details are given in every section as to how the data given has been assembled. The materials in question can thus be freely used for purposes which may be far removed from those for which they were originally assembled.

The Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung presents a rather different model. Together with pedagogical texts, periodicals and encyclopedias, the portal also hosts two extremely complex and interesting other resources.

The first (Treptow an der Rega Schulprogramme/Jahresberichte) brings together documentation published by the schools in Treptow an der Rega (now in Polish Pomerania, named Trzebiatów) from 1834 to 1939.

The documentation published includes syllabi, registers and historical information on the elementary, secondary and technical schoolsin PDF format, accompanied by detailed notes.

The second is a database (Lehrerverzeichnisse) of Prussian and German teachers, of both sexes, working in schools from the middle of the 1800s to 1945. The database traces the careers of over 138,000 teachers, which can be accessed through a multi-criteria search engine.

The documents in question are now only directly accessible in a digital form. The lists of teachers published annually by the ministry of education are also now available in PDF.

The BBF databases bring together archival materials held by the library and by other German libraries specialising in pedagogy. They are geared towards simplifying research by making frequently consulted material which would otherwise be difficult to access available online.

The BBF database is unusual inasmuch as its aims are primarily “conservational”. It provides original, in a certain sense “raw” materials, which are nonetheless accompanied by a state of the art research engine.

Both the BBF and the INRP databases are examples of what Roy Rosenzweig calls “invented archives.” In other words, they are collections of documents from different sources assembled for a specific purpose n a single website, an autonomous online archive⁴⁶.

A third, much smaller, electronic archive is devoted exclusively to the history of education in British Columbia, an English-speaking region of Canada. Homeroom is managed by Patrick Dunae, an educational historian, with the help of academics and, above all, of students⁴⁷.

The website is concerned, for the time being, at least, predominantly with document conservation, inasmuch as no effort is made to elaborate on the texts published.

The only explanatory notes appearing on the site refer to the criteria and methods used in assembling the archive, which ber witness the an extreme archivistic and philological rigour.
 

⁴⁴ http://www.archives.gov.on.ca/french/exhibits/education/index.html. Another very recent site from Canada makes it possible to carry out simultaneous searches in the catalogues of all the public libraries and archives in the country: it is the Site Web de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, http://www.collectionscanada.ca/index-f.html. The Canadian project follows the lead of its American counterpart, American Memory, portal of the Library of Congress, which provides online access to publicly and privately owned materials on America history (around 9 million items), http://memory.loc.gov/.
⁴⁵ http://www.inrp.fr/she/bases_tables.htm.
⁴⁶ The author of the definition is R. Rosenzweig, The Road to Xanadu: Public and Private Pathways on the History Web, in “Journal of American History”, 88, 2, 2001, p. 560, http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/roadtoxanadu.php.
⁴⁷ http://www.mala.bc.ca/homeroom/.

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