concepts concerning evidence and recordness with creating institutions' own self-interest in protecting themselves legally and ethically. It thus sanctions a potentially powerful strategy to get archival issues addressed by record creators at the front end of the records continuum, which is essential if an archival record is to survive in the electronic era. Yet with its heavy focus on institutional and official records in its formulation and examples, the accountability approach also carries with it, as some Australian advocates are now beginning to recognize,70 a danger of rendering into two camps the administrative and cultural roles of archivists, and thus of devaluing archives' role as a bastion of national culture and societal memory in favour of narrower, strictly legal accountabilities. The same threat is implicit in the emphases of Canada's neo- Jenkinsonians and, as will be seen, in the formulations of some electronic records theorists. "Reinventing archives": electronic records and archival theory The revitalization or rediscovery of provenance has also been motivated by the many challenges posed to archivists by electronic records. Discussion about such records is increasingly dominating the professional discourse, and is leading to exciting new conceptual insights, as well as to new strategies and practices.71 Despite significant contributions by Canadians and Australians, the leadership in the electronic records discourse belongs to the United States, especially to David Bearman.72 The early impact of electronic records, or machine-readable records as they were called, was not quite so promising, however. In panic over the then relatively new technology, some commentators in the 1970s and early 1980s advocated that archivists should stop being archivists, and instead become com puter specialists or information managers in order to cope with this challenging new medium. In what I have called the "first generation" of electronic records archives, there was also a strong emphasis on information content over provenancial context, on library cataloguing over archival description, on one time, one-shot statistical datafiles over continuing and continually altering rela tional databases and office systems, and on treating electronic datafiles as discrete and isolated items rather than as part of the comprehensive, multi-media information universe of the record creator.73 Such approaches by the [41] pioneering, first-generation of electronic records archivists are perfectly understandable: the only working models available to them had been created by data librarians dealing with social science datafiles bearing the above characte ristics. This changed by the mid-1980s when new information technology featu ring relational databases became the norm in business, universities, and government. The archivally valuable computerized data in such large social and economic programmes' relational systems are often added, revised, or deleted almost every second. Outside the world of such databases, wherein information is at least structured logically, there is the automated office, where text, data, graphics, images, and voice are converted into electronic formats, and even com bined into "compound" or "smart" multimedia documents. All these new and complex computerized formats, until controlled, standardized, and linked to business processes, threaten decision-making accountability and the long-term corporate memory of record creators, especially when joined with a telecommu nications revolution affecting the transmission and interconnectivity of this electronic information. Even more, these new formats threaten the very possibi lity that archives can continue as vibrant institutions able to maintain such records in their full context or functionality over decades and centuries. If an electronic document has only a transient existence as a "virtual" composite or fleeting "view" on the computer screen of randomly stored information created by the different commands of different users in different organizational structures for different purposes, how does any one accountable institution pre serve reliable evidence of specific transactions? What is the functional context of such transient and disjointed data? Whither provenance? Electronic records, much like the earlier thinking of Peter Scott, bring archivists to the era of virtual archives and virtual records, where the physical record and its arrangement, so central to much traditional archival discourse in this century, is now of rather secondary importance compared to the functional context in which the record is created, described by its creator, and used by its contemporaries. Such revolutio nary changes suggested by the electronic record have led archival theorists, such as Sue McKemmish of Australia, to ask, "Are records ever actual?"74 Answers to these fundamental challenges are beginning to come. Archivists are now perceiving that a world of relational databases, of complex software linkages, of electronic office systems, of hypermedia documents, of multi-layered geographical information systems, is, when all the high-technology rhetoric is ARCHIEFWETENSCHAP 70 Upward and McKemmish, "Somewhere Beyond Custody," pp. 145-46, and Frank Upward in Archival Documents, p. 43. For an interesting attempt to break out of this mode, see Sue McKemmish, "Evidence of Me," Archives and Manuscripts 24 (May 1996), pp. 28-45. 71 Regarding the latter, a great number of strategies and practices have evolved, or at least are being recom mended to archivists, to deal with electronic records, although there is no space to discuss them in this essay devoted to conceptual discourse rather than practical methodologies—which is not to say that those methodologies do not generate their own controversies, such as whether archives need acquire physically all electronic records in order to ensure their authenticity or the appropriate linkage of creator metadata and archival contextualized authority files. The best single source for strategic approaches to electronic records remains Margaret Hedstrom, ed., Electronic Records Management Program Strategies (Pittsburgh, 1993), which offers case studies, with analyses of critical factors of success and failure, of electronic records programmes at international (2), national (4), state (4), and university (1) levels, with an overall assessment, and an extensive (59 pages) annotated bibliography compiled by Richard Cox for readers to continue their explorations. See also David Bearman, "Archival Strategies," paper discussed at the SAA 1994 conference, and forthcoming in the American Archivist. 72 For a sample, see David Bearman's works cited throughout these notes; ten of his essays are now collected into David Bearman, Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations 58 TERRY COOK WHAT IS PAST IS PROLOGUE (Pittsburgh, 1994); and a wide range of his commentary and analysis appears throughout all the issues of Archives and Museum Informatics, which he edits. The other principal American voice has been Margaret Hedstrom: see her ground-breaking SAA Manual, Archives and Manuscripts: Machine-Readable Records (Chicago, 1984); and more recently "Understanding Electronic Incunabula: A Framework for Research on Electronic Records," American Archivist 54 (Summer 1991), pp. 334-54; "Descriptive Practices for Electronic Records: Deciding What is Essential and Imagining What is Possible," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993), 53-62; and with David Bearman, "Reinventing Archives for Electronic Records: Alternative Service Delivery Options," in Hedstrom, Electronic Records Management, pp. 82-98. An early pioneer for electronic archiving was also American: Charles M. Dollar; see his "Appraising Machine-Readable Records," (origin ally 1978), in Daniels and Walch, Modern Archives Reader, pp. 71-79; and, more recently, Archival Theory and Information Technologies: The Impact of Information Technologies on Archival Principles and Methods (Macerata, Italy, 1992); and "Archival Theory and Practices and Informatics. Some Considerations," in Bucci, Archival Science on the Threshold, pp. 311-28. An early Canadian voice was Harold Naugler, The Archival Appraisal of Machine-Readable Records: A RAMP Study With Guidelines (Paris, 1984). 73 Cook, "Easy to Byte, Harder to Chew: The Second Generation of Electronic Records Archives," pp. 203-8. 74 For a stimulating discussion, see Sue McKemmish, "Are Records Ever Actual?," in McKemmish and Piggott, The Records Continuum, pp. 187-203. 59

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