documents from different origins: "[r]assembler les différents documents par
fonds, c'est-a-dire former collection de tous les titres qui proviennent d'un corps,
d'un établissement, d'une famille ou d'un individu, et disposer d'après un certain
ordre les différents fonds."1 However, maintaining the identity of a body of records
as a whole is not limited to identifying its distinctness in relation to other records.
Archivists soon recognized that the internal structure of such a body also shapes the
identity of a fonds, and thus they established the Principle of Original Order, a
corollary of the Principle of Provenance. According to this principle, records should
be maintained in the same order in which they were placed by the records' creator.
The underlying idea was that an archive "comes into being as the result of the
activities of an administrative body or of an official, and it is always the
reflection of the functions of that body or of that official." (Muller, Feith, Fruin,
2003, p. 19) In other words, provenance initially assumes a very physical
connotation: it refers to a specific group of records, located somewhere in the
repository, and arranged in a certain physical order. It is the real thing.
Fifty years ago, such a conception was challenged by Peter Scott who, in a seminal
article (Scott, 1966, p. 493-504), laid the basis for a further refinement of the
Principle of Provenance. He highlighted that, in general, archives are not the result
of a single creator who performs a set of specific functions. They are, rather, the
outcome of complex processes where different agents may act as creators. Functions
change, merge and disappear; and the internal structure of the records is the result
of recordkeeping activities that may have little relationship with the business
activities of the creators. By extension, the structure of an archives may have little or
no correspondence with the structure of the creating organization. This approach
led to a new definition of the concept of provenance as it is now understood and
accepted by the archival community - a network of relationships between objects,
agents and functions.2
It is interesting to note that the first edition of ISAD(G) assumes the physical
interpretation, since it defines provenance as "the organization or individual that
created, accumulated and/or maintained and used documents in the conduct of
personal or corporate activity" - that is, provenance is an agent (ICA, 1994, p. 1).
The first edition of ISAAR(CPF) provides the same definition of provenance (ICA,
1996, p. 1). It is only later, in the second edition of ISAD(G), that provenance
becomes "the relationship between records and organizations or individuals" - that
is, provenance is interpreted as a relationship rather than an agent (ICA, 2000,
p. 11). However, the relationship is assumed to be singular whereas it will become
plural in the subsequent documents published by ICA. Also, there is no mention of
provenance as a connection between records and functions, a concept that will be
introduced only in ISDF, as shown in the opening paragraph of this essay.
In recent years, the meaning of provenance has been investigated further, and new
perspectives have been proposed:
The similar notions of societal, parallel, and community provenance have
also been advanced. They reflect an increasing awareness of the impact of
various societal conditions on records creators and record creation
processes at any given time and place across the records' history. Some
archivists have broadened the concept of provenance to include the actions
of archivists and users of archives as formative influences on the creation
of the records. (Nesmith, 2015, p. 286-287)
In particular, Tom Nesmith has provided a definition of provenance that, while
giving rise to some issues due its very broad scope, may provide a basis for a
broadened multidisciplinary perspective on provenance:
The provenance of a given record or body of records consists of the social
and technical processes of the records' inscription, transmission,
contextualization, and interpretation which account for its existence,
characteristics, and continuing history (1999, p. 146).
In short, archival provenance is a complex concept, the sum of different factors that
altogether trace archival records back to their creation and forwards through their
management and use. It is, therefore, a fundamental notion for interpreting and
understanding archival objects. However, new technologies have further challenged
the idea of provenance, asking for its refinement and re-interpretation. The
following sections will illustrate the role of provenance in archival functions and its
transformation as determined by new technologies.
The role of provenance in archival functions
It is not surprising that provenance plays a major role in different archival functions,
due to its multi-dimensional nature. It plays a key role in a fundamental dimension
of archival objects, that is, trust associated with them. This is especially true in the
digital environment, where objects tend to float in a cyberspace with little or no
context, which is great for re-using, re-purposing and re-mixing activities, yet
impoverishes the objects by depriving them of their connoting qualities. This is a
critical issue when we consider that such qualities are - either implicitly or explicitly
- the base upon which trust is created and managed. We have moved from a physical
world where documentary objects are artifacts occupying some space, to a virtual
environment where objects form a vaporous nebula that we can hardly fix on the
traditional axes of the Euclidean space. We need a new topology, a new way to
interpret the objects of our hybrid world where virtual and real mix and overlap. As
Luciano Floridi has pointed out, in the digital world location and presence are
decoupled. We may be digitally present in a particular corner of the infosphere, yet
our physical location may be undetermined (Floridi, 2017, p. 123-125). This holds
true also for the objects and actions that belong to our space of real/virtual
existence, including records and archival functions. It is a major disruption. We do
not just create digital environments - we inhabit them, as spaces for social action,
so we are getting to a point when we may wonder what the real thing is and what
makes up its context, which is crucial for provenance.
archives in liquid times
1 Transl: "Aggregate all different records in fonds, that is, group all the documents coming from the same
body, institution, family or individual, and set the different fonds according to a certain order." Charles
Marie Tanneguy Comte Duchatel, "Instructions pour la mise en ordre et le classement des archives
départementales et communales," Paris le 24 avril 1841, in Lois, Instructions et Règlements Relatifs aux
Archives Départementales, Communales et Hospitalières (Paris: H. Champion, 1884), 17.
2 Hereafter the term "network" is used in its broader meaning as an interconnected or interrelated group of
entities.
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