Summary

The principle of provenance has been the foundation of archival theory and practice since the nineteenth century. This principle has two key elements: that records created, accumulated, and used by a person or group in the course of life and work are to be kept together and not intermixed with records from other sources (expressed by the French "Respect des fonds"); and that the grouping of and sequencing imposed on records in the context of accumulation and use is essential to understanding the interrelations among them as well as being evidence of how they were used (expressed as respecting the "original order" of records) (EGAD, 2016). The principles of provenance and original order are known to be problematic for archival description, with questions arising such as how to "Respect des fonds" when records are jointly owned, created or have multiple subjects. Also, records can be reused and rearranged by different people in different circumstances and times. Does the original order refer to the first ordering of the records (ie. at the point of creation or initial use) or does original order refer to the ordering of the records at the time of transfer into an archive? And does the concept refer to the physical arrangement of the records, or to their intellectual arrangement? Such questions have prompted the need for new archival theories and practices to better represent the complicated stories and relations (ie. Contexts) surrounding records. The Records in Context - Conceptual Model aims to address and overcome these issues faced by the more traditional archival theories, by enabling a more coherent and contextual picture of the records and the stories surrounding the records to be captured and described.

Details

The Records in Context: A Conceptual Model for Archival Description, Consultation Draft v0.1 (2016) explores this concept, examining the history and nature of provenance and context in the archival environment:

"The Principle of Provenance, as traditionally understood, has been questioned and criticized by both archival theorists and practitioners. The rule of Respect des fonds emphasizes and privileges the person or group that has accumulated a body of records, and often does not reflect the social and material complexity of the origins of the records. Individuals interact with one another and with groups, and groups with individuals and other groups. Records by one individual or group are often found in the records of another individual or group. The intellectual content of records may be related to the content of one or more other records. A single record, or single fonds or other accumulation of records, may be jointly created by more than one individual or group. More than one person or group may have differing roles in relation to one record or one set of records. People create and use records, and are frequently the subject of records. Both the emergence of collaborative editing in the networked digital environment, which is creating many records that have complex authorship, and the use of remote storage services that are not fully controlled by the users, raise issues of ownership and custody. All of these observations and more lead to the conclusion that provenance is much more complex than the long established understanding of fonds: a fonds does not exist in isolation, but within layers of interconnected contexts, past, present, and future.

Respect for original order also has given rise to criticism, though not all of the criticism is new. The meaning of Respect for original order has been a matter of contention and, some would say, confusion. Does it mean the original order of the records themselves, or the intellectual order? Increasingly it is understood as, first and foremost, the intellectual order, and secondarily, if at all, the physical order of the records. But this view does not represent a consensus. An ongoing challenge has been that fonds may arrive in an archive with no discernable order. In such cases, the archivist is tasked with reconstructing it, as well as is possible, based on evidence embodied in the records themselves. More recent criticism has questioned the meaning of "original order," as it can only be understood as the state of the records at a given moment, the moment when the records are transferred from the context of creation and use to the context of the archive. Over the course of the time when a body of records is accumulating, the order of the records is dynamic, changing, fluid. Records may, in fact, be reordered, and more than once.

Both the Respect des fonds and the Respect for original order are archival principles, not records management principles. Both are retrospective, whereas, in the context of creation and use, the perspective of a person managing his or her own records or the perspective of a designated records manager is focused on the immediate needs of the person or the group. The fonds and its internal order are in a state of becoming.

While almost all archivists accept the theoretical validity of Provenance, many have become increasingly self-conscious and self-critical about the role that archivists and the application of archival principles play in what is remembered and how it is remembered. This criticism necessarily encompasses more than description, as it also includes appraisal, the evaluations that lead to what is chosen to be remembered and what is not. Viewed broadly, appraisal determines which records are kept and which are not. Memory is selective: what archivists choose to keep directly determines whether the memory is representative of society. These determinations have profound epistemological and ethical implications. Appraisals by both records managers and archivists, as well as accidental loss or dispersal of records, also directly determine the relative integrity or lack thereof of the fonds. Both the records kept and those lost or intentionally removed are part of the story of the fonds, and thus an important facet of the context necessary for evaluating and understanding records by users.

Increasingly, archivists observe that the archival perspective is one among many possible perspectives that may be employed in the understanding of records, that they themselves are performing their jobs in a particular historical (cultural, social, material) context, that their judgements and acts are shaped and informed by the contexts within which they live and work. At the same time, archivists increasingly are observing that the contexts in which records emerge and in which they exist over time are irreducibly dynamic and complex.

When taken together, the two observations lead to the conclusion that archival description is not and never will be perfect, but they also foreground the challenge of making it better, of improving it, of making it possible to more fully express the complexity of context and contexts, of making explicit the different roles of the records managers and archivists in selecting and forming memory, and of being accommodating to the perspectives and values of others…

It is within the context of established and emerging communication technologies, and of an expanded understanding of provenance, that RiC-CM is being developed. RiC-CM is intended to accommodate existing description practices and at the same time to acknowledge new understandings, and to position archives to take advantage of opportunities presented by new and emerging communication technologies. RiC-CM aspires to reflect both facets of the Principle of Provenance, as these have traditionally been understood and practiced, and at the same time recognize a more expansive and dynamic understanding of provenance. It is this more expansive understanding that is embodied in the word "Contexts." RiC-CM is intended to enable a fuller, if forever incomplete, description of the contexts in which records emerge and exist, so as to enable multiple perspectives and multiple avenues of access" (EGAD, 2016, pp. 4-9).

Related entries

Published resources

Reports

• ICA Experts Group on Archival Description, Records in Context: A Conceptual Model for Archival Description, Consultation Draft v0.1 September 2016, International Council on Archives, Paris, September 2016, 116 pp. Also available at https://www.ica.org/en/egad-ric-conceptual-model. Details