Whose voices count? From public records to public memory

Abstract

Traditionally, accession policies of national archive institutions world-wide gave preference, if not exclusivity, to public records. This approach is nowadays under challenge in a number of archives. Private records, often in the form of oral testimony, are gradually finding their place side by side with their public counterparts. The National Archives of Malta recently embraced this approach. Through a project called MEMORJA archivists are becoming not only appraisers of records but actual co-creators (Farrugia 2006). This paper aims to address the question of whose voices count when applied to a real life scenario in particular on the MEMORJA project. The venture had direct implications on the functioning of the leading and participating archivists. Instead of managing the accessions process, they are now going out there in search of oral testimonies, ephemera and audio-visual documentation. This approach poses new challenges. And these are the issues analysed in this paper.