I'm still sorting out various boxes of folklore materials. Today's task was to tackle the big box of audio visual materials. This box has more than 50 audio cassettes, 20 VHS tapes, and one Umatic tape (which I've only seen in text books).For the most part these materials are pretty well described, but what is missing consistently are dates. I know that everyone does not approach research materials the way an archivist does, but as a researcher wouldn't you need to know when these recordings happened? It's one of those strange quandaries about how people conduct research. I would think that even if one intended only to use research for one paper or presentation, that dates would still be important. Alas, archivists do not rule the world and, per usual, we are left to piece together the picture with the surrounding context.
Archivists certainly do not rule the recordkeeping world. But we certainly need to get much more active influencing recordkeeeping practices during the active management stage. Only in this way can we be somewhat confident essential metadata is recorded. Phil
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