I was woken this morning by a combine harvester in the field next to the house. At the window, I saw it take a magnificent sweep as it turned, kicking up dust and swiping in the crop in front, and kicking out a steady belch of dust and chaff from the rear. I closed the window.
In this blog I have used the terms “gleaning” and “winnowing”, both of which are pre-industrial agricultural terms. Archiving is a pre-industrial craft, surviving at the pace of the materials in its hands. But what we have seen in the eight months that passed as the Archive closed down and emptied out has been from an industrial age. The archivists have done it as skilfully as they can, and probably as skilfully as it could be done; but at an industrial pace which did violence to themselves and to the collections they dispersed, and to the people behind those collections, kicking up a steady cloud of dust and chaff which will not settle in our time, or ever.
