Use the RealAudio Player to listen in as IOTA talks with Margaret
Hedstrom, Associate Professor of Archives and Records Management at the University of
Michigan.
This IOTA interview took place in September 1998.
How did you
first get involved in this project?
What was your work at the Fort Hare archives
like this summer?
How do the archives at Fort Hare compare
to South African archives under the Apartheid regime?
"In the transition of government there were major changes in the personnel of the
government archives...These [archives at Fort Hare] are really the archives of the
liberation movements themselves... There is significant documentation about who was where,
when and what they were thinking and the policy statements and the parties and what was
going on in the various missions around the world. Interestingly, some of the more
potentially important materials are audiovisual materials."
How did the assembly of the South
African liberation movement archives begin?
How is information technology being use
to extend access to the materials at Fort Hare?
In this particular case we're talking about an institution that has limited technical
infrastructure. There are connections to the World Wide Web. They are fairly slow...One of
the things we did in our project was to develop a finding aid that describes the materials
that are in the Pan African Congress collection...And that finding aid is on the World
Wide Web... There's obviously a lot of interest in trying to make the documents themselves
accessible and that is something I think will happen at least portion of the material
sooner or later. But it's important to have a sense of how many millions of documents
we're talking about at this point. It's going to be a long time in my view, if ever, that
everything is digitized and accessible remotely. But at this point already someone can
discover this archive. Discover what's in it. And make some decisions about what in the
thousands of boxes of documents might be useful for the kind of research they are doing.
How have the users of archives, in
general, been changing and does technology play a role in that change?
What are some of the ways archives
in South Africa are being used for purposes other than historical research?
While a lot of people probably think about archives as being places where you go to
study long past events that you can't find information about in any other way, archives in
South Africa have been used for a number of very practical and political purposes. The
National Archives, for example, has been providing documents and evidence that is part of
the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. There is a lands claim process
underway for people who were moved off their land during the apartheid period and one of
that way that process is supported is by using documents in the archives...And this is
where issues of who controls the archives [are important]. It's not just controling the
historical interpretation of the past. That is controlled much more by the way historians
look at problems and the archives aren't necessarily the place you go to uncover the
truth. But they add evidence that could be corroborating and that's why there are big
struggles about who is going to control these archives. "
Do you think someday students in the
United States will be able to access primary source materials in the Fort Hare archives
over the Web?
Please direct questions or comments to iota.webmaster@umich.edu.
Last Updated October 23, 1998
