geert-jan van bussel the theoretical framework for the 'archive-as-is' an organization oriented view on archives - part ii assumption that when a retention period has expired, records have lost their organizational, legal, and historical relevance and should be irreparably destroyed (Van Bussel, 2012a). For organizations of local, regional and national governments the subsequent selection and disposal of records are most often mandatory. Although not mandatory for non-governmental organizations, disposing of irrelevant records saves (potentially high) costs for retention and accessibility. Besides that, irrelevant records make organizations vulnerable to legal proceedings, for instance in the context of privacy law, fraud or corruption (Van Bussel and Henseler, 2013). The much disputed 'right to be forgotten' is an essential part of the discussion on the relevance of records (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009; Stupariu, 2015). The fourth dimension of information concerns the Survival (4) of records over time. It pertains to the security and durability challenges, which have to be overcome to realize access, retrieval, and preservation of records in spacetime (Bearman, 2006). It stresses the importance of a reliable and durable ICT infrastructure to enable the continuous and secure storage of records. The features of this infrastructure are fragile and continuously influenced by the restructuring of organizations (Boudrez et al, 2005). The challenge of preservation is almost overwhelming. First, hard- and software configurations are always needed for accessing, retrieving and viewing information, which means that a solution for technological obsolescence should be available. Secondly, the large influx of information requires automated archiving and retrieval functionalities. The ICT infrastructure needs to adapt, transform, renew and grow, but this enhances the risks for obsolescence. Thirdly, records are of a diverse nature. There is a diversity of object types, operating systems and applications. The handling of this diversity is not self-evident, while it is, at the same time, not impossible to change the content of records, which endangers the trust in their reliability. Fourthly, records can only be reliably used, when they can be interpreted by users in their original situational context. A case-based review of this dimension has been offered by, among others, Hockx-Ju (2006). 4.3.2. The two archival principles (B) I recognize two fundamental archival principles, an 'old' and a 'new' one, the principle of Provenance (5) and the principle of (Environmental) Context (6) respectively. Both principles are closely interrelated. It may even be difficult to differentiate between them as a result of the intermingling of both principles within archival scholarly literature. The principles are about the archive as a whole and, indirectly, about the records within it. The 'old' archival principle of Provenance (5) is seen as the 'foundation of archival theory and practice' (Horsman, 1994, p. 51). This 'ambiguous concept' (Sweeney, 2008) has been a topic for scientific discourse since its introduction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It still is. According to Shelley Sweeney (2008, p. 194) 'over the years the principle has been introduced, reintroduced, applied in part, applied in full, studied, and debated without end'. Giovanni Michetti (2016) defines provenance (based on ICA definitions) as the relationship between archives and the organizations or persons 'that created, accumulated and/or maintained and used [them] in the conduct of personal or corporate activity'. It is also the relationship between them and the functions that generated their need. The word 'provenance' refers, hence, to 'the origins of an information-bearing entity or artifact' (Sweeney, 2008, p. 193). That is important, because archives 'should be arranged according to their provenance in order to preserve [its] context, hence, [its] meaning' (Michetti, 2016, p. 59). From its early history, the principle of provenance was meant, first, not to intermingle archives from different origins ('respect des fonds') and, second, to maintain the internal structure of an archive in its 'original order' ('archival bond') because it is a reflection of the functions of an organization or an individual. Both are needed for an archive to have evidential and informational value (Schellenberg, 2003; Posner, 1967; Horsman et al, 1998; Reilly, 2005). Provenance has become a research object in other disciplines to see how it can be used and represented in different contexts. In computer science, the interpretation of provenance is that of data lineage, a description in the ownership history of how a data object was derived (Buneman et al, 2001). Records can become an aggregate of several information objects, may be stored in several locations, may be (part of) databases, documents, spreadsheets, or emails, may cross organizational borders, and may become part of one or more archives. Along the way, their origin and its logistic history may become obscure, may contain gaps, or may be lost (Puri et al, 2012). Systems are developed that trace and analyse provenance across distributed, networked environments, like Chimera in physics and astronomy, myGrid in biology and CMCS in chemical sciences (Simmhan et al, 2005). In visual analytics, it is recognized that the need to trace provenance extends beyond computing and into the realm of human analysis (Lemieux, 2016). In computer science, the focus is on individual items, while in archival science it usually applies to an archive or an aggregation of records. Tom Nesmith (1999) associates provenance with the social and technical processes of inscription, transmission, contextualization, and interpretation of archives, which account for their existence, characteristics, and continuing history. It broadens 'the idea of provenance to include its societal dimensions' (Nesmith, 2015, p. 286). It is a postmodernist interpretation that unmistakable intermingles provenance and context. Using the principle of provenance proves to be complex when there is a 'parallel provenance, 'two or more entities residing in a different context as establishing the provenance of [archives], even when they are involved in different kinds of action, for example creation and control' (Ketelaar, 2007, p. 186-187, based on Hurley (2005)). The object of the principle of provenance is the (business process) archive of an organization or an organizational chain as a whole and the structure of relationships within that archive. It is not meant to contextualize archives. It only wants to ascertain that: [1] archives (or aggregations of records) can be traced back to their creator(s) and their creation, and [2] the 'archival bond' in which their records are embedded can be reconstructed (Duranti, 1997b). For EIM the principle means that metadata about the creation and logistic history of organizational archives are to be preserved and that their internal structure(s) must always be reconstructable. Nevertheless, tracing the history of individual records to safeguard the four dimensions of information seems to be necessary in digital environments (Cui and Widom, 2003). In reconsidering the archival principle of provenance, this is an important reason to add data lineage to the implementation of the principle. archives in liquid times 52 53

Periodiekviewer Koninklijke Vereniging van Archivarissen

Jaarboeken Stichting Archiefpublicaties | 2017 | | pagina 28