All great institutions have archives. In Israel, the state's National
Archive, sets the example, one followed by all corporate bodies, in which
category cities occupy a special place.
The Municipal Archives of Jerusalem were founded in 1965. After long
wanderings and sojourns in various buildings, they have finally come
safely to port in the new city hall opened in 1993. The importance of
Jerusalem in the world geopolitical scene and the spiritual awareness of
humanity justifies considerable effort in the area of its documentation,
not only as regards the past, but equally with an eye to the future. But
before we pass on to our account of Jerusalem's Municipal Archives, we
will review briefly a number of theoretical considerations relating to
archives in general. Afterwards, we will survey some of the practical
aspects of archival work as we describe the collections of the Jerusalem
Municipal Archives. Finally, we will see how computerization allows for a
more efficient use of the data this institution has gathered.
Organizations that busy themselves with gathering, preserving,
classifying, and putting at the disposal of the public, ancient and modern
documents, are essentially libraries, museums and archives. Nowadays we
can add data-banks to this list. The smooth running of these organizations
presupposes a background and training, both theoretical and practical, on
the part of their personnel. Here it will suffice to give a general
definition of the archives as opposed to other documentation centres.
In
contrast to the books in a library or the art-works in a museum, archival
documents were usually practical tools which were not originally intended
for widespread dissemination or publication. At the completion of the work
for which they provide the documentary base, they are transferred to an
"archive" where they are carefully reviewed. If they are deemed to have an
administrative, legal or historic value, they are preserved. Otherwise,
they are destroyed, either immediately, or after a given period. Israel's
Archival Law, the first version of which dates from 1955, gives precise
instructions in this regard. In the course of time, documents whose value
was originally practical becomes purely historical. Take, for example, a
tract of city land of which we know the registration number in the land
survey. The numeration refers us to two dossiers relating to that land.
The first is about a house and garden occupied by a single family in the
time of the British Mandate. This house was destroyed and replaced by a
large building divided into several apartments. The plan of the original
house no longer has a practical value, though it may delight a historian,
particularly if that house was once the residence of a famous person. The
technical details of the new building, however, are
necessary to the work of urban planners, architects, and present-day
administrators.
The Jerusalem Municipal Archives have been basically bound up with the
functioning of the city from the founding of the municipality in 1867, to
the present day. All the municipal documentation has an official role and
a clearly defined legal accountability. In practical terms, the director
of the Municipal Archives is also the inspector-general of documentation
for all the city's departments.
Of course, the Municipal Archives does not stop at this official role. It
takes upon itself the task of bringing together the widest possible
documentation on the history, geography, and sociology of modern
Jerusalem, under all the governments that have ruled it: Ottoman, British,
Jordanian, and Israeli, and in all its neighbourhoods, Jewish, Moslem and
Christian. This vast and varied collection includes archives assembled by
long-since vanished local insitutions, and the private collections of
individuals whose main area of interest was Jerusalem.
The classification of the various archival materials depends on their
content. The Municipal Archives themselves are preserved in accordance
with well-defined criteria. As a rule, we are guided by the principle
"according to source" - this means that the documents are sorted into a
logical framework which accurately reflects the administrative structure
of the city at the time the documents were created or used.
The above only applies to public archives. The handling of private
archives allows for far more flexibility. One may try to preserve the
order given the collection by the donor - but this assumes he or she
actually kept the old papers in some sort of order, but the line of
demarcation is not always clear. In the papers of a very active and
prominent individual, such as the former Mayor, Teddy Kollek, one can find
a great number of documents which are very interesting from the cultural
(literary, artistic) or anecdotal point of view, but which had nothing to
do with Kollek's official activities. Because of their source, the
documents must be preserved and duly catalogued in the Municipal Archives.
The same rule applies to the many gifts which mayors and other municipal
officials receive: the Archives have to preserve and catalogue them, even
if they are, in fact, museum pieces.
One must also take into account a vast assemblage of documents which do
not correspond to what is usually meant by archival material, but which
are nonetheless kept by our institution. First of all, there is the entire
gamut of printed matter. There are myriads of printed works on the subject
of Jerusalem, of which the Municipal Archives hold some 5,000. The
majority of the documents preserved in the Municipal Archives are in
Hebrew, but many other languages are represented, which requires on our
part a complex linguistic infrastructure. In addition to books, the
Archives contain a very varied range of other printed items, such as
brochures, posters, handbills, advertisements, maps, publicity folders,
rationing tickets, and so on. This type of material is not ordinarily
preserved in libraries, which gives it a special value for the
Archives.
The City of Jerusalem is the official publisher of an entire series of
publications, some practical, such as the annual budget and the
instructions relating to municipal taxes, others cultural and artistic,
notably publications aimed at encouraging tourism. All these publications
are treated with the same meticulous archival care, since the Municipality
is officially responsible for their copyright registration, publication,
distribution and preservation. Every three years a list of these
publications is issued; five volumes have already appeared, covering more
than 1,400 publications.
In contrast to these, newpapers constitute a vast and somewhat nebulous
realm. Currently, there are two weeklies in Hebrew and one in English
published in Jerusalem. Since they are entirely devoted to local affairs,
the Archives preserves a complete collection. In addition, five times a
week the city publishes a press bulletin with reproductions of articles on
Jerusalem which appeared in various journals the day before. The Archives
has a complete collection of these bulletins, dating back to 1966, and
thousands of other articles clipped from newspapers and classified
according to subject, dating back to the British Mandate.
Photographs are treated separately. They are an indispensible part of the
Archives, but are acquired, preserved and catalogued in accordance with
methods appropriate to them. The limits of the photo-archive are somewhat
imprecise: after all, illustrations in books are also images, yet they are
not catalogued independently of the work that contains them.
Menachem Levin, the director of the Municipal Archives, has published a
work on old photographs of Jerusalem. The book was published in 1989 (in
Hebrew) by the Ariel Publishing House in a collection entitled
"Photographs of Palestine, 150 Years of Photography in the Land of Israel,
1839-1989." This work is largely based on the collections of the Archives
and reflects its working methods. More than 600,000 photos are preserved
in the Archives. Most were bequeathed by photographers after their
retirement. These are generally in the form of negatives, of which their
donor or donors' descendants left descriptive lists.
Films, video-cassettes, audio-tapes and all manner of recordings form a
separate audio-visual collection. A noteworthy collection contains the
reminiscences of the "City Elders" - notable elderly persons who recorded
their personal account of historical events and evocations of the mood and
feeling of the city of their youth.
In the documentary world, the Archive acts on two different fronts: it
undertakes to cover the present by the daily collecting of articles and
photographs, while at the same time trying to recover and assemble old
documents to prevent them from sinking into oblivion.
The work of archivists is both technical and theoretical. In the area of
theory, the main activity is the appreciation of the value of documents
and their classification and placement at the disposal of the public. The
technical side of the archival work consists of the preservation or
restoration of documents. They also systematically photocopy documents
against the possibility of some disaster which could cause the total loss
of irreplaceable and very precious documents. It is with this intention
that microfilms have been made of all the official minutes of the
Municipal Council's sessions from its beginning and continuing up to date,
a copy of which is deposited in the library of Harvard University.
Occasionally, especially during times of war, volunteers have veritably
rescued the archives. Other documents have escaped destruction thanks to
the intervention of archivists at the demolition of old houses, the
shake-up which accompanies a move, and even at garbage dumps. The recovery
of the Jordanian Municipal Archives in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967
was the most striking such intervention.
A very varied public comes to consult the Municipal Archives. The mayor
and other city officials often need to consult old files before making
important decisions. Citizens need to check the Archives to settle
problems with the bureaucracy, for example, to prove that they were
enrolled in a school long since closed. Others come to the Archives for
information relating to historical, geographical or sociological research.
Many scholarly works, doctoral theses and magazine articles, are based
entirely or in part on documents held in the Jerusalem Municipal Archives.
The Archive also preserves samples of documents from institutions which
have disappeared. According to law, while the majority of documents are
destroyed, a certain percentage is saved for historians. The Jerusalem
Municipal Archives contain documents sorted into almost 10,000 numbered
boxes arranged on 2,000 metres of shelving, in a space of 800 square
metres.
A sophisticated computer system has introduced revolutionary methods into
the archives, as it has in many others. In our era, a large quantity of
data is directly computerized, completely bypassing the written word as a
means of documentation. After it has served its purpose, data must be
evaluated, then preserved or destroyed. In the former case, it requires
new processing in order to be catalogued or even transcribed on to paper,
at which point it becomes true archival material.
One can initially enter into the memory of the computer in haphazard
order, the concrete data furnished by documents - for example, the titles
of files and their sequential numbering. The computer can arrange them in
the designated order (alphabetic, chronological, numerical, etc.) in
accordance with the type of material under review.
This method has a number of disadvantages, because geographic, historical
and administrative reality is often quite vague, or dynamic, and grows
exponentially, and its terminology is often subjective.
A problem in Israel is that of homonyms, e.g., there are so many persons
named Cohen, Levy, Mizrahi, etc. A more serious problem is the lack of
coherence in the variants of official names. A single institution may bear
different names depending on whether one is speaking to an official in his
office or the man in the street. For example, the Administration of Public
Property is generally referred to as the Tabu, the name used by the
Ottoman administration. however, the institution is properly designated by
the title "Land Registration Authority."
To solve such problems, we created a theoretical framework to classify all
the subjects found in the Archive's documents. First of all, we prepared
"menus," comprising comprehensive tables of the material under
consideration. This involved creating an information blueprint of the
administrative structure of the Municipality both past and present, going
in hierarchy from the simple to the complex and from the general to the
particular.
Information on the present-day life of the city, from the historical,
socio-political, and cultural perspective, is accommodated by a grid
classification of phenomena.
Take, for example, photographs. We distinguish six classes of photograph,
each one noted by a registration number:
- Landscapes, buildings (non-portrait subjects)
- As above, but in the Old City
- Activities of the Municipality
- General activities: war and peace, celebrations and ceremonies, riots
and political demonstrations, sports, folklore, artistic exhibitions (the
Israel Festival), etc.
- Jerusalem as a symbol
- Portraits and
photos of individuals (6.0 - local personalities in alphabetical order,
6.1 - visitors from abroad catalogued by country)
We hope that in the foreseeable future, we will be able to include the
photos themselves in the computer's memory: they would appear on the
screen according to call-number.
The classification system applied to the photographs can be applied to
other areas as well. It permits the location of documents even when one
does not know the name. For example, if we were to seek information about
a former student of a school long since closed, the computer will tell us
the number of the box in which there is a chronological list of students.
One of the computer's most basic functions is to effect "intersections,"
or cross-indexing. A person who had an offical duty in the Municipality
may also appear in private archives; there may be photographs of him or
her, or published poetry, or he may have played music or soccer. It is
the role of the computer to establish the link between the disparate
information trails.
In practical terms, the computerization of the Archives' catalogue is done
by a "windows" access-programme. The screen divides into several sections,
some for theoretical and some for practical data. The theoretical section
includes a descriptive listing of all the subjects represented in the
Archives' collection. It also includes an alphabetized thesaurus of all
the terms which may be used to call up documents and various sorts of
information. One can rove with the "mouse" among the theoretical data,
while the other part of the split screen shows the corresponding practical
data.
Entering the titles of archival documents is like using a mathematical
formula. The computer provides the equation, and the archivist writes in
the particular characteristics of each document.
To sum up: we have, in effect constructed an artificial "New Jerusalem"
made of ideas arranged in an almost Platonic order. It is a
"user-friendly" model which serves as an intellectual framework for
concrete reality. The latter is directly entered into the memory of the
computer, but the link between the two worlds (the model and the reality)
is always carefully watched. This permits the user an untroubled journey
along the information highway to the Eternel City.
- Translated by Jacob
Rabinowitz