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.

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