Herramienta para la validación de localidades georreferenciadas

Cook (2012) considers archives to have a role in the creation of a national “imagined community”, a term derived from Anderson (2006, p. 6), who refers to the nation as “an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”. This concept helps to clarify the role of other institutions, such as libraries, armies and newspapers, in creating a sense of nationhood among people who do not actually know each other. Thus, the nation is imagined in the sense that it is mediated through writing or joint experiences. For Anderson (2006), such institutions play an important role in creating a nation by telling a clear story about it, including its character and history. To do this they tend to exclude or downplay competing stories that might be equally valid starting points for a national identity for minority communities, which is often seen as dangerous.

According to Anderson (2006), nationalism was created in the mid-nineteenth century by colonial states. His analysis of three institutions of power – the census, the map, and the museum – is that, even if these three institutions existed before the mid-nineteenth century, the way they worked was changed by colonial states. The three instruments helped colonial states to build their own imagined version of empire (Anderson, 2006). Jory (2000, p. 352) sees the census and the map as allowing colonial administrations to illustrate and conceptualise their power and also to design policies based on the ethnic or racial identity of the colonised state, and the museum as an expression of the link between the modern colonial state and ancient civilisation. Libraries are also institutions that manage cultural collections from their own nations and colonies (Jory, 2000).

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Thus library classification systems may organise material in ways that privilege a particular account of the history of a country. National libraries as institutions contribute to the development of narratives around a particular version of history.

Brown and Davis-Brown (1998) suggest that libraries, archives and museums are involved in a number of activities, including collection maintenance and development, cataloguing and classification, circulation and access, budgetary and financial issues, and preservation and conservation. Modern libraries, archives and museums often follow the Western tradition; they employ a top-down strategy whereby professionals take control of managing collections. For example, experts manage by making standardised classification decisions (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998). In terms of repositories, libraries, archives and museums are similar memory institutions that keep cultural resources but achieve their goals in slightly different ways.

According to Besser (2004) libraries are user-driven and permit users easy access to information while museums are curator-driven and limit such access. These points notwithstanding, some collections might be more accurately described as research-driven; they are accessible in specific circumstances, where archivists provide content to researchers. However, these institutional practices can overlap, at least to a degree. Libraries are institutions which store and manage printed books, which can be rare but are rarely unique. Unique written documents are generally held in archives. Finally, museums are locations for managing and preserving material objects, which are often rare, old, or represent different cultural periods (Besser, 2004).

In terms of preservation, all information institutions collect information and provide access to the public. Rare and valuable documents are usually held in archives, manuscript libraries or special collections. Cultural information is always included in these documents, and such information is considered worthy of preservation (Becvar & Srinivasan, 2009, p. 423; Shilton & Srinivasan, 2007, p. 88). Such Western information institutions often use technology to support the conservation and preservation of cultural context and cultural heritage. They also provide access to local knowledge (ALA Office for Information Technology Policy, 2010; Srinivasan, 2012).

All memory institutions have similar targets in managing and preserving collections, even though different institutions oversee different types of material and also have differing professions managing them. Besser (2004) shows that museums, libraries and archives function as depository institutions but may use different methods of access, such as different classification systems. They may also exhibit differences in their respective roles, collections, procedures and levels of cataloguing. To a certain extent, their functions tend to overlap. However, in many cases they can still maintain their complementary roles and characteristics. This means that significant differences exist in terms of the professional cultures of librarians, archivists and curators, many

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of whom have different languages and practices. The following section introduces three types of information institution: libraries, archives and museums.

2.7.1 LAMs in Thailand

In the past 100 years, Thailand has followed Western nation-building models and has developed from a Buddhist kingdom into a modern nation-state (Boonaree & Tuamsak, 2012; Jory, 2000).

Although Thailand is a country that has never been colonised, it has been influenced by Western education and technology. Jory (2000) indicates that, around 1868-1910, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) tried to integrate Thailand and its territories, in order to unify them, establishing Thai as the standard national language throughout the country. Furthermore, national education changed from a system influenced by Buddhist learning to one which followed a Western lead. It was intended to show that the nation's civilisation was equal to that of Western countries. The language policy rendered other local languages worthless, including the Lanna language in the upper northern region (Abhakorn, 1997; Jory, 2000).

Jory (2000) argues that the National Library in Thailand also represents an attempt to define Thai civilisation. A national library embodies a national culture, albeit one which often reflects the interests of elite groups, by shaping knowledge as the cultural identity of the nation, in this case Thailand, maintaining raw materials which form the national heritage, and playing a major role in collecting, classifying, preserving and reproducing them (Jory, 2000). The institution has an important role in collection, classification, and preservation. It establishes knowledge of the cultural heritage of the Thai nation (Jory, 2000), although its collection management procedures have also been influenced by Western countries. The collection policies derived from the West have effectively controlled how the Thai National Library defines national culture, influencing the concept of a library as a repository of books which increase knowledge (Jory, 2000).

The media and institutions that represent modern nations reflect the image of Western countries:

clocks, novels, newspapers, censuses, maps, museums (Anderson, 2006). In Thailand, the National Library is a significant image of civilisation because it is the place which preserves knowledge of a literary heritage, especially in the form of primary sources such as PLMs, samut khoi manuscripts, stone inscriptions and bound printed volumes (Jory, 2000, p. 352). Jory states that certain groups use institutions like libraries and museums to define the nation and to describe what can be understood as relevant history. Other material is hidden or denigrated. It is a highly political process. In the Thai context, Thailand has long defined by the history of Siam, with Lanna subordinated. Lanna material may have been collected but it was marginalised in the narrative, in order to ensure that Thailand could say that it had a coherent national story, like a Western country. By revaluing Lanna history, including PLMs, it can be seen that there are

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alternative histories, not solely the simple story about Thai history that the people who created the National Library wanted to tell.

In terms of LAMs and PLMs, PLMs do not fit neatly into Western systems used to define documents. For example, they are similar to printed books, as would be typically collected in Western libraries, in that there are multiple copies of the same content copied out many times.

Yet they are also like material in archives, as they can be unique texts. They are also similar to museum artefacts, as they are often thought of as precious material objects. Given this, how existing theories of community participation might be applied to the management of such material is difficult to evaluate.

2.7.2 Summary

Traditional structures in information institutions such as libraries, archives and museums tend to be top-down vertical hierarchies. Anderson demonstrates the power of such institutions to control and influence the public through the concept of imagined communities. LAMs have the same objective in managing their collections, particularly in terms of preservation and access. In the past, in Thailand, LAMs followed Western practices by focusing on civilisation as nationhood and tended to devalue Lanna culture.