Abstract
Archivists processing documents rely on factors such as authorship and provenance to contextualize their materials and render them searchable. But in my past experience as an archives user, I repeatedly came across instances of anonymity: letters and diaries by unnamed authors or to unknown recipients, photographs of unknown subjects. In some cases this anonymity is a loss of information that was once there, but in other case it enabled the material to come into existence in the first place: such as in the case of satirical political poetry, for which a writer might face legal censure. In this literature review, the issue of anonymity in the archives is explored, both in a pragmatic sense (recommended strategies for managing it), and a philosophical sense (according anonymous documents the same status as documents with known authors).
Highlights
Provenance is a foundational archival tenet, prescribing that records should be“maintained according to their origin and not ‘intermingled’ with those of another provenance” (Roe, 2010, p. 15)
The recommended practice in archival cataloging is to derive the title of a collection from the name of its originator,2 meaning that the originator is effectively responsible for both ‘author’ and ‘title’ access points, and that works with an anonymous creator are left with neither, which makes cataloging them in a standardized way significantly challenging
Different types of anonymity can exist at any level of granularity, but with vast collections plural anonymous creators may well be involved which adds a level of complexity beyond the scope of this essay
Summary
Provenance is a foundational archival tenet, prescribing that records should be“maintained according to their origin and not ‘intermingled’ with those of another provenance” (Roe, 2010, p. 15). While provenance makes perfect sense as a basis for the physical storage of materials and itemization of them within finding aids, when it comes to cataloging a collection difficulties can arise because provenance does not or reliably map onto a single metadata field (title, creator, and so forth). When enough information about the origins of archival materials is available to be fitted into the slots of an electronic catalog often more tailored towards managing books, such glossing over the mismatch between provenance and metadata can be made to work. The recommended practice in archival cataloging is to derive the title of a collection from the name of its originator, meaning that the originator is effectively responsible for both ‘author’ and ‘title’ access points, and that works with an anonymous creator are left with neither, which makes cataloging them in a standardized way significantly challenging. It should be noted that while electronic cataloging highlights this difficulty, it alleviates it by creating the possibility for researchers to retrieve anonymous materials from searches on a particular subject, or chronological period, or via a full text keyword search
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