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...impact on culture and society at national, regional, and local levels. Institutions need to assess documents and objects against criteria that, in effect, "name" these items as significant. Most institutions claim that this process is objective, failing to acknowledge that it is underpinned by ideological, political, economic, cultural, and social influences. The position adopted in this paper is that the process of naming document or object as significant will always reflect the directions and consciousness of a society's dominant groups, and that this will shape interpretations and narratives of the past. Thus the voices of a community's minority or special interest groups will be silenced. This paper suggests that neither the concept of significance nor the process of assessing significance is benign; both should be seen as areas of tension and contestation.
INTRODUCTION
As I was writing this paper, I read a review of a television documentary commemorating the fifth anniversary of 9/11. The documentary was about Richard Drew's Falling Man series of photographs of a person falling to his death from the World Trade Center. These photographs became the subject of media self-censorship and debate in the United States:
Several days after the photograph appeared, it vanished.... There was a deeply held belief the deaths of the jumpers weren't proper, indeed they were cowardly. The images that came to symbolize the day were of helmeted heroic rescuers working in the rubble and the jumpers disappeared. (Blundell, 2006, p. 24)
These images are representative of the significance debate. History is written by victors. It is the dominant paradigm and its culture and institutions that define what is to be remembered, and how it will be remembered.
Within collecting institutions, such as libraries, museums and archives, that seek to provide enduring access to the cultural memory, the concept of significance emphasizes importance and consequence to the community served by these institutions. Assigning significance creates an illusory "fiction" of collective understanding, so that an item of documentary heritage, once designated significant, is deemed worthy of remembering. The consequence of assigning significance is understood within the institutions as helping to shape the future consciousness, interpretations, and narratives of their communities. The act of assigning significance is a social action that is constituted through a symbolic need to establish or maintain a social thread or connection, to preserve a footprint that is deemed important, and to ensure the continuity of a community's memory. Piggott (2005, p. 311) describes memory as inherently "social." He suggests that in the process of assigning significance we commit to memory an intentional rendering, interpretation, and narrative that will have long-lasting implications. The reasons and consequences underpinning the assignation of significance should be carefully examined and considered by librarians, as their involvement in this process has an indirect impact on future interpretations and shared narratives of history. In this respect, the process of identifying material as significant has a symbolic function; it creates knowledge about an object's importance and about repositories of knowledge built and maintained by librarians, which helps shape future cultural memory.
The UNESCO-sponsored Memory of the World Programme exemplifies this process. The program identifies those document records of human endeavor that are designated as significant and may be digitized so that they remain accessible to future generations. In discussing the current institutional trend of digitizing collections, Dalbello (2004) recognizes the impact of this activity on the shaping and structure of cultural memory: "the shaping of cultural memory corresponds to the emergence of shared narratives from an array of possible historical interpretations. Loci of memory, key events, key texts or artefacts then become symbolic points of reference for group identities" (p. 267).
As Pymm (2006, p. 65) notes, the process of determining an item's significance and the impact of this process have received scant attention from the library profession. In libraries, determining and assigning significance proceeds as a largely uncontested practice. While the concept of selection is well documented, the associated concept of significance and its implications and consequences for both library collections and society remain unexplored and uncontested.
In this paper I explore the concept of significance as it relates to collecting institutions such as libraries and archives. I argue that, while the concept is not identified as problematic in the literature, it is highly problematic in practice. This is primarily because the process of identifying an item as significant is a subjectively constituted practice that constructs a social reality and produces a collective consciousness. It is underpinned by the narratives, directions and values of dominant groups within a society, who influence institutional agency and practice in the designation of significance. Thus the construct of significance cannot guard against "collective amnesia," because the voices of a community's marginalized groups or disenfranchized...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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