---
title: Liminal archiving practices of late 20th century civil service departments: a case study
duration: PT10M
speaker: Jon Hickman
contact: @jonhickman
---
In the late 90s I spent my university holidays archiving for a civil service building and development agency. The documents were important, which is why they entrusted this work to hungover 19 year olds. But they were actually important though.
Each file was linked to a parcel of land and defined that parcel's borders and the limitations on or expectations for its use. The loss of any information could have consequences for land ownership and on the (re)development of the local environment beyond just one property. It was important that all of the information was logged and that there was a clear chain of custody for all of it. In a mostly paper based, partially computerised, partially networked, barely web connected office environment it was left up to the 19 year olds to sort something out.
Our solution involved accessing a record system with a mysterious French name on a UNIX dumb terminal, emailing ourselves from that, waiting for the adults to go for lunch so we could get on a PC so that we could print out all of our emails, sending a fax at exactly 4:45pm every day, and moving large heavy boxes of paper in contravention of many health and saftey laws. It's possible that poor choices were made early on in this project and that a more fundamental review of the data management was needed. It's also highly likely that 3 or 4 years later they did something else, like digitising all of the records to CDs or whatever.
The people behind this dumb-email-paper-fax-sneaker-box-net went on to become web designers, social workers and producers in reality TV shows so it is unlikely their story has ever been heard until now. As far as we know, we got away with this all, although I will accept no responsiblity if you found your boundary moved 10 yards in 1998 due to poor faxing.