Archivists Quotes

“What can I say, I'm a sucker for abandoned stuff, misplaced stuff, forgotten stuff, any old stuff which despite the light of progress and all that, still vanishes every day like shadows at noon, goings unheralded, passings unourned, well, you get the drift.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn't say their didn't shore it up with footnotes and research.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“My work is whatever I want it to be, and I report to no one regularly. The head librarian -- the man in charge of the University's entire collection -- is a figurehead, well-to-do and poorly read, with whom I have only perfunctory contact.”
― Martha Cooley, The Archivist

“A good deal of time spent researching this book might well have been wasted and valuable opportunities missed if it had not been for the help and suggestions of archivists and librarians.”
― Antony Beevor

“So where does one go in such a wobbly, elusive, dynamic, confusing age? Wherever the librarians and archivists are.

They’re sorting it all out for us.”
― Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All

“Since the first satellites had been orbited, almost fifty years earlier, trillions and quadrillions of pulses of information had been pouring down from space, to be stored against the day when they might contribute to the advance of knowledge. Only a minute fraction of all this raw material would ever be processed; but there was no way of telling what observation some scientist might wish to consult, ten, or fifty, or a hundred years from now. So everything had to be kept on file, stacked in endless airconditioned galleries, triplicated at the [data] centers against the possibility of accidental loss. It was part of the real treasure of mankind, more valuable than all the gold locked uselessly away in bank vaults.”
― Arthur C. Clarke

“I’m looking for information.”

She lifted her arms, indicating the breadth of the library, and declared with self-parodied drama, “I’m surrounded by it!”
― S.R. Hughes, The War Beneath

“It was this idea that books contained secrets. Important information that would be lost if someone didn't preserve it. And then I studied history and got really into that and I realized that was true not just about sex but lots of things. If someone doesn't care about books, shit gets lost. And then I became a librarian. And archivist.”
― Sara Gran, The Book of the Most Precious Substance

“Some historians, by prioritising accuracy of information and parading their attentiveness, diligence, and industry, emphasised only the objective of factual knowledge which might prove detrimental to their scholarly creativity, empathy, and synthetic power as well as their aesthetic judgement and broader understanding.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 16.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The tide of nineteenth-century whig orthodoxy – with its unequal emphasis on constitutional history – subsided, in the mid-twentieth century, to reveal new approaches to History. In the Stubbsian realm of later-medieval political history, for instance, this tide’s retreat enabled the advance of waters which emphasised personalities and the importance of political connections and patronage networks.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 18–19.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“Description may require the study of individual documents which thereby stimulates examination of informational value: those actors, factors, or features populating the documentary landscape.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), pp. 30–1.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“The sphere of ‘historical research’ does not readily or exactly correspond with that of ‘archival practice’ but the notion that even if a single component of the latter is omitted from the former that that then validates the profession’s collective defenestration of all issues historical fails to appreciate the complexity of all arguments.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 41.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth

“A view of archivists as historians’ handmaidens accepts subservience, infers disciplinary subordination, and implies professional inferiority, which does not realise the scale and extent of archivists’ true accumulated expertise. Consequently, if we invert the proposition to pose not whether historians make better archivists but whether archivists make better historians, it is possible to consider not whether archivists should be scholars and engage in historical research but whether the realm of historical scholarship should incorporate archivists and archival activities.


R. E. Stansfield-Cudworth, ‘Archivists and Historians: Perspectives on the Place of Historical Research in Archival Practice’ (2015), p. 46.”
― Robert E. Stansfield-Cudworth