“Picking Our Text” Review

• MacNeil, Heather. "Picking Our Text: Archival Description, Authenticity, and the Archivist as Editor," The American Archivist 68 (2005): 264-278.

In this article, Heather MacNeil examines the issue of authenticity as related to archival description. She admittedly writes from a postmodern perspective, and she intends to reexamine an area that has largely been ignored. She argues that more work should be done examining the relationship between description and authenticity. She says that textual criticism offers a parallel for what the archivist often does in describing a collection, because both textual critics and archivists are trying, as much as possible, to describe an authentic representation of an original body of work.

She says that comparing textual criticism and description could mean several things. First, she contends that archivists should be up front about the nature of their work by admitting that they play an influential role on the way that later researchers interpret a collection. Second, she contends that finding aids are socio-historical texts, and that the changes that take place in them shape the way that researchers understand a collection. Third, she suggests that archivists should be open, in some way, to showing the various iterations of the text of a finding aid over time. This can be attained, largely, through the use of annotations, although one does not want to overuse them. She ends by noting that further exploration of this topic needs to be pursued.