Automation and Information Retrieval in Archives—the Broad Concepts
R. D. Campbell · The American Archivist · 1967
B ECAUSE OF the continuing proliferation of "paper" (whichdoes not need to be documented in the American Archivist) and its impact on archives, the need for more accurate and quicker access to archival holdings is becoming urgent.The impact is felt not only because of the great increase in the number of collections accumulated by individuals, corporate bodies, government agencies, and other record-gathering groups but also because of the ballooning size of each collection or archive.Before there were dictaphones, typewriters, and the like, when correspondence was limited by the physical fatigue of handwriting, the papers of a President of the United States numbered a few thousand pieces.Today they may number in the millions.This accumulation of vast quantities of paper is one symptom of the copymania of our society.Archives are subject to the opposing pressures of mounds of paper and continuously increasing research demands.The way out of the dilemma may be found in more intensive indexing of archival materials by machine.Although it is now almost 15 years since the first marketing of a commercial modern computer, archivists, especially in the social sciences and humanities, have only lately begun to explore the computer's potentialities for lightening the task of search and the preparation of bibliographies.More intensive machine indexing is making more readily available to scholars the known subject material of an archive and, possibly even more important, the unknown and frequently valuable peripheral material buried in hundreds of manuscript boxes.Arrangement of archives without any indexing-arrangement whether by provenance, by data, by geographical area, by individual donor, or by some combination of these-does not in a large collection meet today's research demands.The need is for detailed