Context in archival science
In archives, "the context is all," as Heather MacNeil (1992) entitled her
contribution to a collected volume illustrating the fundamental idea of an archival
fonds. Even before records become part of complex aggregations (i.e., archives or
fonds), in order to exist and have meaning, they must be conceived "in context."
Let us start with some definitions. The Society of American Archivists' (SAA)
glossary (Pearce-Moses 2005) defines record as "data or information in a fixed form
that is created or received in the course of individual or institutional activity and set
aside (preserved) as evidence of that activity for future reference." Another
definition specifies that a record possesses "content, context, and structure," and
that is "used as an extension of human memory or to demonstrate accountability"
(p. 326-27).
So, according to the same glossary, context is "one of the three fundamental aspects
of a record," (p. 91) more specifically, that part of a record that is not the content
(its "intellectual substance" (p. 89)) or the structure (its format or appearance; the
way in which the different elements of the record are "organized, interrelated, and
displayed" (p. 373)). This latter element of the record, its structure, is somewhat
confusingly presented as overlapping the context: it is said to be internal
("relationship of content within a record") as well as external, and the external
structure is what "places a record in the context of an order, a series, and a
collection."
The SAA glossary offers two definitions for the word context in a recordkeeping
environment:
"1. The organizational, functional, and operational circumstances
surrounding materials' creation, receipt, storage, or use, and its
relationship to other materials.
2. The circumstances that a user may bring to a document that
influences that user's understanding of the document" (p. 90).
The first meaning is a very complex one. It first divides the context into two kinds of
sub-elements: non-documentary circumstances and documentary relationships.
The first element is itself subdivided into three kinds of circumstances (respectively
related to the organization creating/receiving and using the record, the function in
which the record participates, and the operations in which the record is involved).
The second meaning may be read as an alternative way of referring to a subset of the
first meaning broadly understood; or, from a narrower perspective, it may
encapsulate the idea that a record has only one context of creation but is open to
being used in different contexts.
It is important to note that the SAA definition of context clearly separates the non-
documentary from the documentary context; and it does not analyze in any detail
the latter. The organization, its functions, and its operations constitute one part of
the context (the "circumstances" of records' creation, etc.), while the "materials"
make up a separate part of the context (emerging in the "relationships" to other
documents). Similarly, "context" and "materials" are conceived as discrete entities,
the former being broader and more diffused than the latter. It is in other words
suggested that the con-text surrounds or encloses the text, and the two can be
analyzed separately.
Let us now consider another perspective on the concept of context, which has more
recently been proposed by the InterPARES research project.1 The first instantiation of
this long-running international project, InterPARES 1, draws on "contemporary
archival diplomatics" to identify and evaluate the nature of modern records. The
project's glossary offers the following definition of context: "The framework in
which the action in which the record participates takes place" (InterPARES, 2001,
p. 2). This definition is action-centered. It articulates the notion of context in
relation to the traditional archival science understanding of records as by-products
of the actions carried out by individuals and organizations in the usual and ordinary
course of their business. The definition continues by partitioning that general
context into more specific slices: "The types of context include juridical-
administrative context, provenancial context, procedural context, documentary
context, and technological context." These different contexts are defined as follows:
documentary context: "The archival fonds to which a record belongs, and
its internal structure" (InterPARES 2001, p. 3);
juridical-administrative context: "The legal and organizational system in
which the creating body belongs" (p. 5). The normative environment of the
records;
procedural context: "The business procedure in the course of which the
record is created" (p. 6). Procedure is defined on the same page as "the body of
written and unwritten rules governing the conduct of a transaction, or the
formal steps undertaken in carrying out a transaction.
In particular, the legislative machinery set up to carry out a given transaction;"
provenancial context: "The creating body, its mandate, structure, and
functions" (p. 6);
technological context: "The characteristics of the technical components of
an electronic computing system in which records are created" (p. 7).2
The different contexts that a diplomatic approach distinguishes are easy to
articulate, similar to unrolling a ball of yarn once you find one of the ends and start
pulling from it. First, you determine the creating body for a record or aggregation of
records, and this will give you the provenancial context, as you only have to tease out
the mandate, structure, and functions of such a body. An examination of the legal
and organizational system in which that record-creating body belongs will give you
the juridical-administrative context. By studying the laws, regulations, and
established practices that regiment the behavior of such an organization and
examining the different entities with which it interacts in the performance of its
business, one can easily uncover the specific set of actions in which the records at
hand were created or received and used. This is the procedural context. This set of
archives in liquid times
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fiorella foscarini and juan ilerbaig intertextuality in the archives
1 For more information on the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems
(InterPARES) project, see at http://interpares.org/.
2 It may be interesting to observe that, while the definitions of documentary context and provenancial context
together correspond to the first definition of context provided by the SAA, the user perspective insinuated by
the second SAA definition of context is not accounted for in the diplomatics-based description of contexts
provided by InterPARES 1.
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