guidance for future action. Their persistence allows them to sustain or corroborate individual or communal memories. They also often have aesthetic qualities and symbolic connections with particular people, institutions, or places. Their richness of affordances transcends any single aspect of their use (Yeo, 2007, pp. 330-331). Conclusion In recent years, 'information' has become something of a buzzword. Its importance is constantly affirmed both by governments and by the popular media, which often promote it as a key to transparency, democratic freedoms, and economic success. Records professionals have been attracted by this message and have frequently sought to adopt an information agenda. To many archivists and records managers, emphasis on information seems to offer a professional image in tune with current developments in the wider world, and the perceived association between information and the emerging digital realm gives it a further aura of desirability and prestige. However, much recent writing about information has been driven by commercial or technological approaches that take little account of the centrality of human agency and social context. We cannot assume that records offer 'the unvarnished facts, the raw data, the actual measurements, the real information' (Hamm, 2011, p. 44) demanded by authors of current business textbooks, or the single 'source of truth' (Kosur, 2015; Roon, 2016) sought by many data analysts and promoters of blockchain technologies. Even when records appear to be purely factual, their content depends on utterances that are circumstantially produced. Users who are aware that 'there is a good deal of game playing in the record production business' (Van Maanen Pentland, 1994, p. 58) will use this knowledge to assist them in formulating and assessing information from the records they encounter. Looking at records through the lens of speech act theory can help us gain a richer understanding of 'the record production business'. While a speech-act view of records does not deny that a record may undergo many adventures in its later life, or that these adventures can be perceived as incessant processes of recontextualisation (Caswell, 2016; McKemmish, 2001), its primary concern is with the moment of inscription and the context in which a record first comes into being. At that contextual moment, what takes place is a matter of action, not a matter of information. Whatever may be our motive for keeping records or our comprehension of using them, their creation is necessarily performative. Speech act theory reminds us that records are not mere information objects or containers of facts, but it also affirms that records do not simply dissolve into interpretation. At the point of inscription, a record and an assertive, directive, commissive, or declarative action are interlinked. 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