need for a fundamental change in archival thinking. The major shifts in the archival discourse of this century suggest the need to recognize these patterns of change within that discourse and to debate the related issues and implications for archival methodologies and strategies, and then to incorporate the results into daily practice. In listening to the collective archival discourse from 1898 to the present, I believe that there are five such broad themes or changes that have emerged, and these in turn suggest to me the need to reconceptualize some of our basic theoretical concepts for the future. The first theme is a marked change in the very reason why archives exist. There has been a collective shift from a juridical-administrative justification for archives grounded in concepts of the state, to a socio-cultural justification for [44] archives grounded in wider public policy and public use. This broad shift reflects in part the dominance during this century of historians as the driving force within the profession and in part the changing expectations by citizens of what archives should be and how the past should be conceived and protected and made available. Archives traditionally were founded by the state, to serve the state, as part of the state's hierarchical structure and organizational culture. Archival theory not surprisingly found its early legitimization in statist theories and models, and from the study of the character and properties of older state records. Such theory has since been widely adopted in many other kinds of archival institutions around the world. Public sanction for archives late in the twentieth century, or at least for taxpayer-funded non-business archives in democracies, has changed fundamentally from this earlier statist model: archives are now of the people, for the people, even by the people. Few citizens would approve the expenditure of large sums of money to fund archives whose contents mainly featured bureaucrats talking to each other. While the maintenance of government accountability and administrative continuity and the protection of personal rights are still rightly recognized as important purposes for archives, the principal justification for archives to most users and to the public at large rests on archives being able to offer citizens a sense of identity, locality, history, culture, and personal and collective memory. Simply stated, it is no longer acceptable to limit the definition of society's memory solely to the documentary residue left over by powerful record creators. Public and historical accountability demands more of archives, and of archivists. However, whether that socio-cul- tural justification is manifested by methodologies based on patterns of use, the study of society and its institutions directly, the functional provenance analysis of records creators, or some other means has not yet been resolved by archivists. The second theme emerging from the archival discourse relates to how archives and archivists have tried to preserve authentic, reliable records as evidence of acts and transactions. Archivists throughout the century have consistently sought to understand and illuminate the context or provenance of a record as much as its subject content. Archivists first accomplished this protection of context by preserving in unbroken custody and in original order all surviving records no longer needed by their parent administration. Such records were most often closed series from defunct organizations, or were old, isolated, prestigious documents. Archivists have now dramatically shifted their focus. Today, they try instead to ensure that records are initially created according to acceptable 62 standards for evidence and, going further, to ensure that all important acts and ideas are adequately documented by such reliable evidence. In a world of rapidly changing and very complex organizations that create voluminous and decen tralized records, in a world of electronic records with their transient and virtual documents, their relational and multi-purpose databases, and their cross-institu tional communication networks, no reliable record will [45] even survive to be available to the archivist to preserve in the traditional way -unless the archivist intervenes in the active life of the record, sometimes before it is even created. When such records are able to be preserved in archives, the comfortable notion of the permanent value of archival records over time will require similar modifi cation, simply because the electronic record either will become entirely unreadable or must be recopied and its structure and functionality reconfigured into new software every few years.78 Traditional preservation of archival records focused on proper standards for the repair, restoration, storage, and use of the physical medium that was the record. With electronic records, the physical medium becomes almost totally irrelevant, as the records themselves will be migrated forward long before the physical storage medium deteriorates. What will be important is reconfiguring the actual functionality and thus provenance or evidence-bearing context of the "original" record, and it is on that problem that archivists must increasingly focus their attention. The third broad theme relates to the source of archival theory. A century ago, archival principles were derived from a diplomatics-based analysis of individual documents or from the rules devised for the arrangement and description of groups or closed series of records received by archives from stable, mono-hierar chical institutions. A quite different perspective is now required. Because there are countless of on-going series of multi-media records to appraise within unstable organizations, because such appraisal should often occur at the compu ter system-design stage before a single record has been created, modern appraisal focuses on the functions and transactions of the record creator, rather than on individual records and their potential uses. The focus has shifted, therefore, from the actual record to its functional process or context of creation, from the physical artifact to the "very act and deed" which first caused that artifact to be created. While this shift in archival perspective from the record to its context was initially stimulated by the spectre of virtual documents in computer systems and by the recent developments of function-based appraisal theory, it reflects some of the strategies for interrelational description of multiple-creator fonds, or postcustodial proposals for "archives without walls" existing on a world-wide Internet. Archival theory now takes its inspiration from analysis of record- creating processes rather than from the arrangement and description of recorded products in archives. As Eric Ketelaar concludes, "functional archival science replaces descriptive archival science, only by a functional interpretation of the context surrounding the creation of documents, can one understand the integrity of the fonds and the functions of the archival documents in their original context."79 63 ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE 78 See James M. O'Toole, "On the Idea of Permanence," American Archivist 52 (Winter 1989), pp. 10-25, for an important analysis. O'Toole is also exploring the continuing relevance of the usually unquestioned concept of "uniqueness" in archival theory and practice, in a forthcoming article. 79 Ketelaar, "Archival Theory and the Dutch Manual," p. 36.

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Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 1999 | | pagina 33