Archival science
Archival science, or archival studies, is the study and theory of building and curating archives, which are collections of documents, recordings, photographs and various other materials in physical or digital formats.
To build and curate an archive, one must acquire and evaluate the materials, and be able to access them later. To this end, archival science seeks to improve methods for appraising, storing, preserving, and processing collections of materials.
An archival record preserves data that is not intended to change. In order to be of value to society, archives must be trustworthy. Therefore, an archivist has a responsibility to authenticate archival materials, such as historical documents, and to ensure their reliability, integrity, and usability. Archival records must be what they claim to be; accurately represent the activity they were created for; present a coherent picture through an array of content; and be in usable condition in an accessible location.
An archive curator is called an archivist; the curation of an archive is called archive administration.
History
Archival science emerged from diplomatics, the critical analysis of documents. Archival science is also closely related to historical archaeography, an interdisciplinary field that analyses various, mutually correlated aspects and properties of ancient manuscripts and early printed materials, and thus prepares and produces scholarly descriptions and editions.In 1540, Jacob von Rammingen wrote the manuscript of the earliest known archival manual. He was an expert on registries, the German word for what later became known as archives.
Rammingen elaborated a registry for the Augsburg city council. However, since he could not attend the council meeting, he described the structure and management of the archives in writing. Although this is not the first work about archival science, earlier manuals were usually not published. Archival science had no formal beginning. Jacob von Rammingen's manual was printed in Heidelberg in 1571.
Traditionally, archival science has involved the study of methods for preserving items in climate-controlled storage facilities. It is also the study of cataloguing and accession, of retrieval and safe handling. The advent of digital documents along with the development of electronic databases has caused the field to re-evaluate its means and ends. While generally associated with museums and libraries, the field also can pertain to individuals who maintain private collections or business archives. Archival Science is taught in colleges and universities, usually under the umbrella of Information Science or paired with a History program.
A list of foundational thinkers in archival studies could include: American archivist Theodore Schellenberg and British archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson. Some important archival thinkers of the past century include: Canadian archivist and scholar Terry Cook, South African archivist Verne Harris, Australian archival scholar Sue McKemmish, UCLA faculty and archival scholar Anne Gilliland, University of Michigan faculty and archival scholar Margaret Hedstrom, American archival scholar and University of Pittsburgh faculty member Richard Cox, Italian archival scholar and faculty at University of British Columbia Luciana Duranti, and American museum and archival scholar David Bearman.
Standards
There is no universal set of laws or standards that governs the form or mission of archival institutions. The forms, functions, and mandates of archival programs and institutions tend to differ based on geographical location and language, the nature of the society in which they exist and the objectives of those in control of the archives. Instead, the current standards that have been provided and are most widely followed, such as the ICA standard, ISO standard, and DIRKS standard, act as working guidelines for archives to follow and adapt in ways that would best suit their respective needs.Following the introduction of computer technology in archival repositories, beginning in the 1970s, archivists increasingly recognized the need to develop common standards for descriptive practice, in order to facilitate the dissemination of archival descriptive information. The standard developed by archivists in Canada, Rules for Archival Description, also known as RAD, was first published in 1990. As a standard, RAD aims to provide archivists with a consistent and common foundation for the description of archival material within a fonds, based on traditional archival principles. A comparable standard used in the United States is Describing Archives: A Content Standard, also known as DACS. These standards are in place to provide archivists with the tools for describing and making accessible archival material to the public.
Metadata comprises contextual data pertaining to a record or aggregate of records. In order to compile metadata consistently, so as to enhance the discoverability of archival materials for users, as well as support the care and preservation of the materials by the archival institution, archivists look to standards appropriate to various kinds of metadata for different purposes, including administration, description, preservation, and digital storage and retrieval. For example, common standards used by archivists for structuring descriptive metadata, which conveys information such as the form, extent, and content of archival materials, include Machine-Readable Cataloguing, Encoded Archival Description, and Dublin core.
Provenance in archival science
in archival science refers to the "origin or source of something; information regarding the origins, custody, and ownership of an item or collection". As a fundamental principle of archives, provenance refers to the individual, family, or organization that created or received the items in a collection. In practice, provenance dictates that records of different origins should be kept separate to preserve their context. As a methodology, provenance becomes a means of describing records at the series level.The principle of provenance
Describing records at the series level to ensure that records of different origins are kept separate, provided an alternative to item-level manuscript cataloguing. The practice of provenance has two major concepts: "respect des fonds", and "original order". "Respect des fonds" rose from the conviction that records entering an archive have an essential connection to the person or office that generated and used them; archivists consider all the records originating with a particular administrative unit to be a separate archival grouping, or "fonds", and seek to preserve and describe the records accordingly, with close attention to evidence of how they were organized and maintained at the time they were created. "Original order", refers to keeping records "as nearly as possible in the same order of classification as obtained in the offices of origin", gives additional credibility to preserved records and to their originating "fonds". Records must be kept in the same order they were placed in the course of the official activity of the agency concerned; records are not to be artificially reorganized. Records kept in their original order are more likely to reveal the nature of the organizations which created them, and more importantly, of the order of activities out of which they emerged.Not infrequently, practical considerations of storage mean that it is impossible to maintain the original order of records physically. In such cases, however, the original order should still be respected intellectually in the structure and arrangement of finding aids.
Practices before the emergence of provenance
Following the French Revolution, a newfound appreciation for historical records emerged in French society. Records began to "acquir the dignity of national monuments", and their care was entrusted to scholars who were trained in libraries. The emphasis was on historical research, and it seemed obvious at the time that records should be arranged and catalogued in a manner that would "facilitate every kind of scholarly use". To support research, artificial systematic collections, often arranged by topic, were established and records were catalogued into these schemes. With archival documents approached from a librarianship perspective, records were organized according to classification schemes and their original context of creation were frequently lost or obscured. This form of archival arrangement has come to be known as the "historical manuscripts tradition".Emergence of provenance
The principle of "respect des fonds" and of "original order" was adopted in Belgium and France about 1840 and spread throughout Europe during the following decades. Following the rise of state-run archives in France and Prussia, the increasing volume of modern records entering the archive made adherence to the manuscript tradition impossible; there were not enough resources to organize and classify each record. Provenance received its most pointed expression in the "Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives", a Dutch text published in 1898 and written by three Dutch archivists, Samuel Muller, Johan Feith, and Robert Fruin. This text provided the first description of the principle of provenance and argued that "original order" is an essential trait of archival arrangement and description.Complementing the work of the Dutch archivists and supporting the concept of provenance were the historians of the era. Through subject-based classification aided research, historians began to concern themselves with objectivity in their source material. For its advocates, provenance provided an objective alternative to the generally subjective classification schemes borrowed from librarianship. Historians increasingly felt that records should be maintained in their original order to better reflect the activity out of which they emerged.