Archival Automation in the United Kingdom and the Relationship between Standardization and Computerization

Continuing in a tradition of looking back at the history of the archival profession’s engagement with and response to computers, a story is told of early archival computerization and the development of standards in the UK from the mid-1960s to roughly the mid-1980s. Standardization and computerization initially emerged as separate threads, but these threads started to coalesce in the mid-1970s and soon became intertwined in a project of systematization. This project of systematization took as its focus the creation of finding aids, and archivists ceased to engage with the development of the principles of the new information technology and the ways in which meaning was being structured, represented, and manipulated inside these new “machines.”