Hugh Alexander Taylor (22 January 1920 – 11 September 2005) was an English-born Canadian archivist, archival theorist and educator.
Taylor left the Public Archives of Canada to become the Provincial Archivist of Nova Scotia in 1978, retiring in 1982 to Wolfville, NS.
As Terry Cook noted in his 2005 obituary, Taylor "was intent on constructing archives anew, imagining them as places where archivists connect their records with social issues, with new media and recording technologies, with the historical traditions of archives, with the earth’s ecological systems, and with the broader search for spiritual meaning.
[5] The archivist, then, has a unique opportunity in the future if he addresses himself to this vital task of information retrieval, in both the field of historical and modern records.
His bank of interest will be far wider than that of the records manager, but he must learn the language of the computer like his native tongue if he is not to be relegated to the fringes of administration from which he came We must not be seduced by a kind of academic dolce vita or we will surely die as archivists and will fail to ensure for the future of the continuation of that record which has, by so much effort, been saved from the past.
We are the builders of bridges, no castles, as we cross from the assurance of 'now' to the uncertainty of 'new'...There is, I believe, a spiritual element to all this which resides perhaps in the imagination, with faith as a neighbour, through which we come to recognize the humans we are meant to be.