Archivist as Communication Director:
The origin of archival cybernetics
Dispatch #2: July 5, 2026
The first time the term cybernetics appeared in The American Archivist was a Spring 1967 special issue on Automation in archival and manuscript collections. The issue contained articles by Frank Burke, then working information retrieval specialist at National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Rita Campbell, Archivist of the Herbert Hoover Archives and Research Associate of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University; Russel Smith, Head of Presidential Papers Section, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Barbara Fisher, staff of the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, and Dr. Frank B. Evans, Director, Diplomatic, Legal and Fiscal Records Division, Office of the National Archives, had a piece in the reviews section entitled “Automation, Information, and the Administration of Archives and Manuscript Collections: Bibliographic Review.” It is here, page 335, that cybernetics is first noted in an archival journal. The term is one of “four major themes that dominate the history of information automation: information retrieval and documentation, cybernetics and other theories of control, information systems development, and data processing.”
Their bibliographic review begins with Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. With the explosion of electronic technology in the postwar era, the need for “new and rapid information services” became apparent to researchers. In dialectical fashion (and following Elizabeth Wood’s piece from the same issue, who Fisher would also later cite), they write: “To cope with this accelerating information explosion the very technology that helped produce it was applied to its control.” The field of library science was to adapt to these changing conditions -- a new language of operation, engineering, and control were entering the field’s vocabulary. The acceleration of research processes accelerated the computerization of documentation systems, and Fisher and Evans trace this development in the literature back to 1949.
Fisher and Evans do not shy from the potential impacts of computation -- in fact, they propose a reorientation:
Archivist, to information specialist, to communications director -- to see it stated so plainly may cause us today to reorient ourselves. Two government employees were arguing, through the literature on cybernetics, that we must insert ourselves toward the management of communication. Cybernetics is dealt with at length in a section on “Theories of Control:”
Their main point of contact with cybernetics was through businessman John Diebold, who “translated automata and their abstractions into the language of everyday problems.” They cite W. Ross Ashby:
They take Ashby and Diebold up on this new approach to the analysis of behavior, as well as the possibility for “more responsive searching under more effective processing controls.” Their one hedge is regarding the requisite slowness of historical research, and that the behaviors attributed to the speed of many single searches is not the same work as that of “control and synthesis of information, the boundaries of which [the historian] has established over a period of time and through the process of experience.” However, following a piece J. Kabk had recently penned in the London Times Literary Supplement, technologies may truly transform the process of our experience, Kabk citing the ability to date archaeological discoveries by measuring radioactive carbon. They provide a solid primer list to the field of cybernetics: Wiener and Ashby,Stafford Beer, Herbert A. Simon, as well as The Analytical Machine, an account of computer history by Jeremy Bernstein, first printed in The New Yorker (1963).
Within the same section on theories of control, they return to the field of information science -- for while they feel the literature has become in some instances needlessly mathematized, for the purposes of the archivist, they recognize that since the beginning of the 1950s there had been important work done on the relationship of the computer to the humanities. The article continues on to discuss new developments in data processing, concluding in a petition that as computers continue to be integrated into the information specialist’s workflow, “thorough communication between sources of technical information and interested repositories must be firmly established and maintained.”
Their bibliographic review begins with Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945. With the explosion of electronic technology in the postwar era, the need for “new and rapid information services” became apparent to researchers. In dialectical fashion (and following Elizabeth Wood’s piece from the same issue, who Fisher would also later cite), they write: “To cope with this accelerating information explosion the very technology that helped produce it was applied to its control.” The field of library science was to adapt to these changing conditions -- a new language of operation, engineering, and control were entering the field’s vocabulary. The acceleration of research processes accelerated the computerization of documentation systems, and Fisher and Evans trace this development in the literature back to 1949.
Fisher and Evans do not shy from the potential impacts of computation -- in fact, they propose a reorientation:
-
“To appreciate fully the implications of information automation and to find practical applications suited to his needs, the archivist or manuscript curator should regard himself less as a custodian of physical entities...than as an information specialist...He will become...a communications director, enabled through technology to accumulate, to store, and to communicate information about masses of material over which he previously had only relatively superficial control.”
Archivist, to information specialist, to communications director -- to see it stated so plainly may cause us today to reorient ourselves. Two government employees were arguing, through the literature on cybernetics, that we must insert ourselves toward the management of communication. Cybernetics is dealt with at length in a section on “Theories of Control:”
-
In addition to the trend toward the computerization of information retrieval and documentation, there has emerged during the past two decades a control theory with far-reaching implications for in-depth analysis and management of information. In the cybernetic theory of control the behavior of the computer can be patterned to simulate the behavior of the human brain; the computer can also be programed as a model, performing various mechanical and feedback functions simulating human performance and human method in performance.
Their main point of contact with cybernetics was through businessman John Diebold, who “translated automata and their abstractions into the language of everyday problems.” They cite W. Ross Ashby:
- Cybernetics deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible. . . . It is in this way that information theory comes to play an essential part in the subject; for information theory is characterized essentially by its dealing always with a set of possibilities.”
They take Ashby and Diebold up on this new approach to the analysis of behavior, as well as the possibility for “more responsive searching under more effective processing controls.” Their one hedge is regarding the requisite slowness of historical research, and that the behaviors attributed to the speed of many single searches is not the same work as that of “control and synthesis of information, the boundaries of which [the historian] has established over a period of time and through the process of experience.” However, following a piece J. Kabk had recently penned in the London Times Literary Supplement, technologies may truly transform the process of our experience, Kabk citing the ability to date archaeological discoveries by measuring radioactive carbon. They provide a solid primer list to the field of cybernetics: Wiener and Ashby,Stafford Beer, Herbert A. Simon, as well as The Analytical Machine, an account of computer history by Jeremy Bernstein, first printed in The New Yorker (1963).
Within the same section on theories of control, they return to the field of information science -- for while they feel the literature has become in some instances needlessly mathematized, for the purposes of the archivist, they recognize that since the beginning of the 1950s there had been important work done on the relationship of the computer to the humanities. The article continues on to discuss new developments in data processing, concluding in a petition that as computers continue to be integrated into the information specialist’s workflow, “thorough communication between sources of technical information and interested repositories must be firmly established and maintained.”