which it is produced (Cornelius, 2014, p. 190; Gitelman, 2013, pp. 2-3). From this
perspective, claims that information can be objectively accurate and impartial are
misguided attempts to conceal its contingent role. Arguments of this kind call into
question many of the ideas voiced in records management literature, about
information, accuracy, and the relevance of these notions to an understanding of
records and their contents.
In addressing these issues, this essay explores connections between records and
information, and examines how a number of other theoretical perspectives (notably
the philosophy of speech acts) can enhance our comprehension of records and their
functioning. It considers how notions of 'information' might relate to a view of
record-making and record-keeping that takes account of speech act philosophy, and
it concludes that records have social as much as informational roles.
Distortion, error, and conscious production
Medical records offer a useful starting-point. Despite the recognised importance
of careful record-keeping in the medical sphere, studies of the content of medical
records have revealed numerous inadvertent mistakes made by clinicians hastily
entering details of diagnosis or treatment (Bowman, 2013; Lloyd Rissing, 1985).
But many distortions have been found to occur for other reasons. When clinicians
record what their patients have told them, cultural or organisational pressures often
come into play and lead them to condense the patients' words into formal
professional narratives. Although records ostensibly report what patients said, the
patients' vocabulary is converted into that of the clinician, and 'what little of
patients' voices appears in those reports appears only on the health professionals'
authority' (Poirier, 1999, p. 34; cf. Berg, 1996, pp. 505-507). The potential for
accidental error, ambiguity, or deliberate misrepresentation can never be excluded.
Similar constraints are apparent outside the medical world. Investigations of social
work case files have shown that they frequently document tasks, goals, and their
accomplishment, but cannot capture the everyday complexity of the personal lives
that prescribe and determine them (Floersch, 2000, p. 179). Other researchers have
reported that files created by parole officers cannot fully reflect the behaviour of
parolees and often give undue emphasis to incidents that support officers' desired
outcomes (McCleary, 1977). In many organisations, minutes of meetings tend to
capture only formal aspects of a meeting and omit controversial or politically
sensitive aspects (Whittaker, Laban, Tucker, 2006, pp. 104-106; Winsor, 1999, pp.
218-219). Some commentators affirm that records such as these are created by those
in positions of power and remain largely silent about matters their creators prefer to
overlook (Thomas, Fowler, Johnson, 2017); others argue that lived experience can
never be adequately reduced to mere textuality (Floersch, 2000, pp. 169-170; Lynch,
1993, p. 287).
Many studies have indicated that record-making practices are often directed at
minimising any trace of digressions from formal procedures or showing the creators
of records in the best possible light. Workers compiling timesheet records may seek
to demonstrate compliance with official accounting rules rather than recording the
precise hours they actually worked (Brown, 2001). An ambassador's dispatches
may be worded to give an exaggerated sense of achievement or to conform with the
expectations of the government at home (Tosh, 2015, p. 107). Even if we set aside
the most blatant examples of deceit, such as the falsification of police records
discussed by John Van Maanen and Brian Pentland (1994, pp. 73-75), it is clear that
the self-interest of record creators and their desire to operate successfully within
bureaucratic cultures often leads them to construct records in ways that are
intended to create particular impressions or advance particular points of view.
Much of the early work that points in this direction was undertaken in social science
disciplines. As long ago as 1980, social scientists Nancy Cochran, Andrew Gordon,
and Merton Krause concluded that, although 'the commonly accepted
understanding is that records preserve information about the incidence of
events', records are 'proactive rather than simply descriptive' and are preceded
and shaped by the plans, goals, intentions, and assumptions of their creators (1980,
pp. 5-6). Archival scholars did not generally come to share this view until rather
later (and it is a view still rarely acknowledged in the practice-focused literature of
records management).
Awareness that records 'are not neutral, factual, [but] are designed to produce
an effect in some kind of audience' (Van Maanen Pentland, 1994, p. 53) reached
archival scholarship with the postmodern 'turn' in the archival literature of the
1990s. Terry Cook was among the first archivists to acknowledge that all records are
conscious products. When we encounter records or archives, he said, we can be
beguiled into assuming that they convey neutral data or information (Cook, 1994,
p. 319), but behind the record lies the record-maker and the contexts of activity in
which the record was produced, and 'archivists want to know not just what was
communicated, but when, by whom, to whom, where, how, [and] why' (1994, pp.
302, 312). At the start of the new millennium, Cook (2001, p. 25) linked these ideas
to a postmodern view of records, when he characterised archival postmodernism
'as focussing on the context behind the content; on the power relationships that
shape the documentary heritage; and on business-process conventions as being
more important than informational content'.
Diplomatic scholarship
Of course, it is not only archivists sympathetic to postmodernism who emphasise
process and activity. Instead of simply associating records with information, writers
engaging with archival science have often stressed that records 'are inextricably
connected with activity' (Eastwood, 2017, p. 16), although they have not always
agreed what that connection might be or how it might operate.
Many archivists, particularly in countries whose legal traditions are those of
Roman-influenced civil law, have believed that explanations of the connections
between records and activity can be discovered within the discipline of diplomatic
scholarship. This discipline, built on the work of the 17th-century monk
Jean Mabillon, is known as 'diplomatic' in Europe and as 'diplomatics' in North
America. It seeks to define objective means of assessing the authenticity of
documents that have legal consequences, particularly charters, diplomas, and other
documents that attest to the granting of rights. Over time, legislative systems have
archives in liquid times
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