Principles

  1. One mentioned already is that the archive selects material according to the needs, purpose and intention of the collection and with the ultimate ‘user’ in mind. Subject areas of interest may be narrow, but the related or ‘grey’ areas should not be overlooked in selection.
     
  2. Material for archival preservation should be either unique to a collection or not duplicated in several existing collections where there may be a waste of resources preserving the same thing three or four times over. Legal deposit is a rarity and one archive cannot assume that any other is collecting in a particular area or country of origin. In these circumstances it becomes important for all sound archives to have selection policies and to discuss their policies with other archives both nationally and internationally and ensure that valuable material is kept somewhere, but not in each and every archive. This is one of the main reasons why the International Association of Sound Archives was formed.
     
  3. Quality. This is a relative principle; closely related to the unique quality of the material. In theory the best quality material should be selected, but sometimes, when the only available material is of poor quality, its unique nature overrides the principle of quality. A closely related factor is that of technological change which may mean a recording is only available on an ‘obsolete’ carrier. Archives should not select on the basis of whether or not they can replay material - this is library selection, when the only material in a library relates closely to the playback machinery available either in the library or in the user’s home. An archive must consider other qualities of the material and if it is essential to the collection, but on an unplayable medium, an archive needs facilities to transfer it to a usable medium.
     
  4. Some material may be ‘unusable’ because of copyright or contractual restrictions. However, copyright can lapse and one of the functions of an archive could be expressed as outliving copyright and other such restrictions. The material is held for the restricted period (it may even be possible to use it under certain conditions during such a period) and then, when copyright is released, the archive will be able to grant access to valuable material. Copyright restrictions should not necessarily deter selection of valuable items and the selector must think beyond the temporary restriction.
     
  5. The timing of selection is also an important principle. It should never be a once-for-all decision. Some material need be kept for only short periods while checks are made on existing material which it may duplicate. Other material can be looked at retrospectively after a period or periods of time. Most archives, which practice selection, will be found to use this principle.
    An archive will collect material in accordance with its purpose and objectives but, as these may change at intervals, the selection principles will have to be flexible to accommodate these changes. Selection principles should, therefore, be subject to review.
     
  6. One of the main principles of selection is objectivity within certain guidelines. Selection staff should be as objective and free form bias as possible within realistic parameters. Hindsight is a useful mechanism here and it can be achieved by adopting a long-term policy of selection. Optimum selection decisions are best taken after a ‘decent’ interval.

These principles are not of course criteria for selection, but they include many of the considerations the archivist should take into account in formulating his own criteria for selection.

The rest of this publication will expand and elucidate many of these principles and indicate how practice and practical considerations affect them.

The criteria for selection of sound recordings have not been, and indeed cannot be laid down as hard-and-fast rules, but it is hoped that the readers of the book will find many practical examples and working principles in the pages which follow; examples of criteria used in different types of archive with particular purposes which will assist the profession of sound archivists to arrive at reasoned, practical criteria for selecting material to store in archives for passing on to future generations.

IASA has recognised that selection is a central area of the archivist’s concern and this series of papers exists to continue the debate about criteria or guidelines for selection; a debate which may rumble on for some time. In highlighting the problems we can only hope that our successors will recognise that we took notice of an obligation to select, and even if they may quibble over what was selected or destroyed, will be grateful for the production of more manageable archives.

Helen Harrison is the Media Librarian at the Open University in England. This paper is an extended version of the brief Chairman’s introduction given at the IASA conference in Budapest, 1981.