Muller, Feith, and Fruin produced their Manual for the Dutch Association of
Archivists, in cooperation with the State Archives of the Netherlands and the
Ministry of the Interior. Each of the one hundred rules advanced in the Manual
was formally debated by the Society during the 1890s. Typical of a work written
by committee, the accompanying text bears many marks of careful qualification
and elaborate examples, even if the rules themselves are forcefully stated. The
Manual also reflects Muller's exposure to French archival theory from his
attendance in 1873 at the École des chartes in Paris and the introduction from
Germany of the concept of provenance into several Dutch archives.
The Dutch authors' chief contribution was to articulate the most important
principles (or "rules") concerning both the nature and the treatment of
archives. The trio stated in their very first rule, which to them was "the founda
tion upon which everything must rest," that archives are "the whole of the
written documents, drawings and printed matter, officially received or produced
by an administrative body or one of its officials...." Rules 8 and 16 enunciated
the twin pillars of classic archival theory: archives so defined "must be kept
carefully separate" and not mixed with the archives of other creators, or placed
into artificial arrangements based on chronology, geography, or subject; and the
arrangement of such archives "must be based on the original organi[22]zation
of the archival collection, which in the main corresponds to the organization of
the administrative body that produced it." There, simply stated, are the concepts
of provenance and original order. The latter rule of respecting and, if necessary,
re-establishing the original filing and classification system used by the creator,
was considered by the Dutch authors to be "the most important of all, from
which all other rules follow." They believed that by so respecting the arrange
ment of original record-keeping systems, the all-important archival activity of
elucidating the administrative context in which the records are originally created
could be much facilitated.7
We now recognize certain limitations of the pioneering Dutch Manual. As
noted, it is first and foremost about arrangement and description, as is reflected
in the very title of the book; it has little to say about appraisal and selection as
we now understand these terms. It is about government, public, or corporate
records and their orderly transfer to archival repositories to preserve their
original order and classification; it dismisses private and personal archives to the
purview of libraries and librarians. Most important, the Manual is based on
experience the authors had either with limited numbers of medieval documents
susceptible to careful diplomatic analysis or with records found in well-organized
departmental registries within stable administrations. Such experience led
directly to their assumption, as noted above, that the "original organization of
the archive" in the creating institution would correspond "in its main outline
with the organization of the administration which produced it."8
This close relationship no longer holds true in modern organizations where
numerous record-keeping systems in several media in many sub-offices no longer
closely correspond to the internal structural organization or to the multiple
functions of the creating administration. Moreover, the computer and telecom
munications revolutions of the last decade have radically accelerated this
decentralization and diffusion, to a point where operational functions now cross
all manner of structural or organizational lines. Herein lies the reason for the
recent dissonance between the archival perceptions animating appraisal and
electronic records strategies and those underpinning arrangement and descrip
tion. A detailed understanding of rapidly changing administrative structures,
functions, and work activities is central to modern archival appraisal and for
controlling electronic records, as it is to contemporary business process reengi-
neering and computer system design. Yet such understandings can no longer be
derived solely from the study of records following the classic Dutch methodo
logies devised for arrangement and description.
The Dutch authors described accurately what they saw in the registries and
administrative structures of their time, and from that experience they articula
ted our core professional principles. Yet as administrative structures have signifi
cantly changed over this century, these principles have sometimes been too
rigidly defended or too literally interpreted. This is not the fault of the Dutch
authors, but rather a tribute to the convincing nature of their work. Indeed,
while the authors were rather too modest in describing their work as "tedious
and meticulous," they were generous, and realistic, in not wanting it to sit "like
a heavy yoke on the shoulders of our colleagues. We shall not mind," they stated,
"if there are deviations from [the rules] in certain details or even in essen
tials." Over the past century, there certainly have been deviations from, as well
as confirmations of, the principles articulated by Muller, Feith, and Fruin.9 The
importance of the Dutch Manual rests on its codification of European archival
theory and its enunciation of a methodology for treating archives. Transatlantic
archival pioneer Ernst Posner observed that the Manual gave "final sanction" to
theoretical principles that had gradually been evolving throughout the previous
century, while the first international archival congress in Brussels in 1910
formally endorsed the Dutch principles.10 As late as 1956, American archival
35
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
7 S. Muller, J.A. Feith, and R. Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives (1898), transla
tion (1940) of the 2nd ed. by Arthur H. Leavitt (New York, reissued 1968), pp. 13-20, 33-35, 52-59.
The story of the Manual is best told in English in Marjorie Rabe Barritt, "Coming to America: Dutch
Archivistiek and American Archival Practice," Archival Issues 18 (1993), pp. 43-54. I have used the 1940
translations of the terms found in the Manual itself, rather than Barritt's modernization of them.
More recently, see Cornells Dekker, "La Bible archivistique néerlandaise et ce qu'il en est advenu," in
Bucci, Archival Science on the Threshold, pp. 69-79. The best source of biographical information on the
Dutch trio, including their not entirely happy interpersonal relations, is Eric Ketelaar, "Muller, Feith
and Fruin," Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique 57 (nos. 1-2, 1986), pp. 255-68.
s Cited by Frank Upward, who also makes this critical point, in his "In Search of the Continuum: Ian
Maclean's 'Australian Experience' Essays on Recordkeeping," in Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, eds.,
The Records Continuum: Ian Maclean and Australian Archives First 50 Years (Clayton, 1994), pp. 110-30.
34
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
9 Muller, Feith, and Fruin, Manual, p. 9 (authors' original preface). The Dutch themselves led the way in
recognizing new administrative realities affecting record-keeping and thus in recasting or expanding the
original rules; it is unfortunate that some others do not show the same flexibility towards their successors.
As an example of such changes by the Dutch, see Herman Hardenberg, "Some Reflections on the Principles
for the Arrangement of Archives," in Peter Walne, ed., Modern Archives Administration and Records
Management: A RAMP Reader (Paris, 1985), pp. 111-14. Eric Ketelaar has shown that a nineteenth-century
Dutch forerunner to the Manual's authors, Theodoor Van Riemsdijk, broached the idea of functional and
organizational analysis as the basis of archival theory, but that his ideas were pushed aside, which thereby
"blocked the development of archival theory for a long time." See "Archival Theory and the Dutch
Manual," Archivaria 41 (Spring 1996), pp. 31-40.
10 Ernst Posner, "Some Aspects of Archival Development Since the French Revolution," in Ken Munden, ed.,
Archives and the Public Interest: Selected Essays by Ernst Posner (Washington, 1967), p. 31; Lawrence D.
Geiler, "Joseph Cuvelier, Belgian Archival Education, and the First International Congress of Archivists,
Brussels, 1910," Archivaria 16 (Summer 1983), p. 26.