of the records replaced provenance as the animating force in most North
American archival appraisal, description, and public service until the late 1970s.
Accordingly, the ideal education of the archivist was perceived to consist of gra
duate degrees in history supplemented by on-the-job training.
Nesmith argues that this older approach has changed radically in Canada
over the past two decades, from both Canadian and European influences.
Archivists trained as historians began to apply their historical skills and research
methodologies not as before to the subject content of records, but to researching
and understanding, in Nesmith's words, "the evidential context [36] which gave
them birth." In this Nesmith was himself a leader, calling for a "history of the
record" as the basis of Hugh Taylor's "new form" of socio-historiographical
scholarship, and establishing on a regular basis in Archivaria a "Studies in
Documents" section as a way to develop a "modern diplomatic."49 Supporting
this same thrust to refresh provenance, I then argued that, by focusing on
"provenance, respect des fonds, context, evolution, interrelationships, order" of
records, that is, on the traditional heart of our professional and theoretical dis
course, archivists could move from an "information" to a "knowledge"
paradigm, and thus to renewed relevance in the era of electronic records and
networked communications.50 Rather than abandoning archival principles for
those of information management or computer science, as some commentators
were then suggesting, or remaining locked in the Schellenbergian content-
centred cocoon, Canadian archivists began discovering (or "rediscovering") the
intellectual excitement of contextualized information that was their own profes
sion's legacy. A whole range of archival studies soon flourished across Canada to
"explore provenance information about the creators of documentation, the
administration of documents, and the forms, functions, and physical
characteristics of various archival documents" in all media.51
Perhaps not surprisingly, this encouraging Canadian atmosphere led
Americans David Bearman and Richard Lytle to publish their oft-cited 1985
article "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," in Archivaria rather than in
the United States. In this landmark statement, they argued that provenance-
based retrieval of information, centred on a study of form and function of
records, and the context of creation, and re-presented to researchers in authority
records, was superior to subject- and content-based methods of retrieval, and
thus provided the key to the archivist having a valuable role in the age of
electronic records. Provenance was not some past legacy, but rather a promise of
future relevance based on the archivist's "unique perspective [of] how organi
zations create, use, and discard information."52
To this indigenous Canadian stream of rediscovering the intellectual or theo
retical core of the profession through the historical and contextual analysis of
records and their creators was joined an awakened interest in European archival
theory per se. The key figure here is Luciana Duranti, who came to Canada from
Italy in 1987 and articulated through a series of six articles the centuries-old
discipline of diplomatics and posited its continued relevance for understanding
modern records.53 Duranti's exposition contained a rigour of analysis beyond
that which had evolved through the above-noted Canadian neo-provenance or
"history of the record" approach, and helped to spark, with her other work and
that of her students, a neo-Jenkinsonian revival of focusing archivists' attention
on the record, especially on its properties as evidence of the acts and trans
actions of its creator.54 While diplomatics has much of value to say to modern
archivists (as does the central thrust of the indigenous "history of the record"
approach) about the necessity to conduct careful research into [37] the form,
structure, and authorship of documents, especially in electronic environments,
it is evident that diplomatics must still be coupled with a broader understanding,
as Booms, Samuels, Taylor, Nesmith, and Cook suggest, of the animating func
tions, structures, and interrelationships of the creators that contextualize those
isolated, individual documents.55 As these two traditions merge in the Canadian
archival discourse, it should not become a question of a top-down functional
ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP
49 Ibid., pp. 14, 18-19. See also Tom Nesmith, "Archives from the Bottom Up: Social History and Archival
Scholarship," (originally 1982), ibid, pp. 159-84; and his introductory editorial, "Archivaria After Ten
Years," Archivaria 20 (Summer 1985), pp. 13-21. To these ends, Nesmith also teaches as the central core of
the graduate-level archival education program he created at the University of Manitoba a Tayloresque-
humanist exploration of the nature and impact of record-keeping in society, historically and for the
present day and future (see note 60 below).
50 Terry Cook, "From Information to Knowledge: An Intellectual Paradigm for Archives," Archivaria 19
(Winter 1984-85), pp. 46, 49.
51 Nesmith, "Introduction," p. 18. His book (Canadian Archival Studies) was also designed, in part, to show
case the rich variety of this exploration and rediscovery of provenance, based on the study and analysis of
records and records creators.
52 Bearman and Lytle, "The Power of the Principle of Provenance," pp. 14-27, especially p. 14 for the quota
tion and footnote 1 for their sensitivity to the positive Canadian influences in receiving their work.
53 See Luciana Duranti, "Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science," Archivaria 28 (Summer 1989), pp. 7-27,
for a general statement in the first of a series of six articles, and especially "Part V," Archivaria 32 (Summer
1991), for an explicit enunciation of the overall diplomatic method and approach, as opposed to its com
ponent parts outlined in the four earlier articles.
54 For a flavour, see Heather MacNeil, "Weaving Provenancial and Documentary Relations," Archivaria 34
(Summer 1992), pp. 192-98; Janet Turner, "Experimenting with New Tools: Special Diplomatics and the
Study of Authority in the United Church of Canada," Archivaria 30 (Summer 1990), pp. 91-103; and Terry
Eastwood, "How Goes It with Appraisal?," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), pp. 111-21, as well as his article
in note 34 above. For highlights of Luciana Duranti's work, see those cited in notes 5 and 53 above, as well
as her main theoretical statements in "The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory;" "The Archival Body
of Knowledge: Archival Theory, Method, and Practice, and Graduate and Continuing Education," Journal
of Education for Library and Information Science 34 (Winter 1993), pp. 10-11; and "Reliability and
52
TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE
Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications," Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995), pp. 5-10. Other
Canadian archivists not within Duranti's immediate orbit have also defended the primacy of the record:
Barbara Craig, for example, has repeatedly called attention to the record's importance, demonstrating
thereby that there is the potential for much compatibility between the "history of the record" approach (of
which she is a good representative) and the "diplomatics" stream; see among others her "The Acts of the
Appraisers: The Context, the Plan and the Record," Archivaria 34 (Summer 1992), pp. 175-80, and well as
her many writing on health and British government records. For a different, post-modernist, and certainly
non-Jenkinsonian perspective on the importance of the record, as hermeneutic text to be read (in the
sense of contextualized narration), see Brown, "Records Acquisition Strategy and Its Theoretical Founda
tion: The Case for a Concept of Archival Hermeneutics." As my critics rarely acknowledge, I have also def
ended the central importance of the record in archival conceptualizations; see, among others already cited,
"It's Ten O'clock: Do You Know Where Your Data Are?" Technology Review (January 1995), pp. 48-53.
55 This point is made explicitly by one of the few published case studies of applying diplomatics, whose
author notes "that it will be necessary to employ other tools of the archivist's trade in order to corroborate
the discoveries of diplomatics and to address questions left unanswered by diplomatics." Among such tools
are the "History" of administration, law, and organizational culture (ideas, societal forces, etc.) and
"Archival Theory," which I presume would encompass the wider provenance-based insights that the history
of the record approach offers into the juridical context of creation. See Turner, "Experimenting with New
Tools," p. 101. With billions of records to appraise, modern archivists should reverse Turner's formula,
simply because no one can possibly undertake modern appraisal by performing diplomatic analyses on
individual documents (which in some electronic and audio-visual environments do not even exist at the
time of appraisal). Her formula would then read "that diplomatics can be usefully employed to corroborate
the discoveries and answer any questions left unanswered by the functions-based, provenance-driven
macroappraisal." Diplomatics becomes, then, not unlike Rick Brown's suggested use of an archival her
meneutic, a means to corroborate macroappraisal analyses and hypotheses.
53
