records belongs in a larger whole: the fonds of that organizational body. This is a
group of records that, like any other aggregate wholes, possesses an internal
structure. The "network of relationships that each record has with the records
belonging in the same aggregation" constitutes the so-called "archival bond"
(Duranti, 1987, p. 215-216). We will return to this special link among records later
in this contribution. For the time being, it will suffice to say that a record cannot exist
without archival bond. In the absence of this connection to other records
participating in the same activity, a record becomes merely a document, information
affixed to a medium.
This characterization of context exemplifies the robustness and rigor of the
analytical method that is typical of the diplomatic approach. Diplomatics operates
by "eliminating] the particularities and anomalies of records in the interest of
identifying their common, shared elements" (MacNeil 2004, p. 224). The central
idea of diplomatics is "that all records can be analyzed, understood and evaluated in
terms of a system of formal elements that are universal in their application and
decontextualized in nature" (Duranti, 1997, p. 215; emphasis added). According to
diplomatics, the form (or internal structure) of a document reveals its context of
creation (that is, its external structure); what matters in the context is formally
codified, and can be discerned in the document's form by anyone who knows the
code.
All contextual elements that do not belong to the specific system of laws,
administrative rules, and business procedures, which dictates how actions should be
carried out in any given legally-binding situation, are not considered relevant to the
understanding of the record from a diplomatic perspective. Furthermore,
diplomatics as a system does not capture the open-endedness and lack of linearity of
all the contextual elements. These contexts are neatly separated only through an
analytical stance that, by abstracting some of the elements of reality, fails to capture
the fact that reality is anything but neat.
This approach has profoundly influenced the theory and the practice of
recordkeeping. Decontextualization and prescriptiveness are especially the hallmark
of most records management literature, which is based on the premise that "[t]he
analytical tasks performed by the record professional require that the complexity
and messiness of the real world be eliminated, like in a laboratory setting"
(Foscarini, 2012, p. 397). As written elsewhere, "[i]n the record disciplines, the
world and the word, the context and the text, are conceived as discrete, finite, and
dissectible entities. It is part of a record professional's responsibilities to abstract the
instantiation of events, which the record impartially encapsulates, from the flux of
life, to analyze and describe all elements that participate in the action and the
documentation of the action concerned, and to identify and fix those properties
that point to the true meaning of the record" (Foscarini, 2015, p. 120).
In recent decades, archival scholars have started to question some of the precepts of
traditional archival science by, for instance, investigating its received view of the
provenancial context, or context of creation. The traditional, static view of the
context of provenance as a single organizational creating body has been
reconceptualized by taking into account the dynamic character of the juridical-
administrative and procedural contexts. Organizations have begun to be seen as
flexible and adjusting rather than monolithic entities. First, the view of the
organization as a rigid administrative structure, best represented in a hierarchical
organizational chart, has become untenable since the focus of research has shifted
towards the operational processes carrying out the functions of the organization.
By prioritizing functional over structural considerations, the very identity of the
records creator has come into question (Douglas, 2010; Yeo, 2010b). These changes
in our understanding of the context of provenance have come hand in hand with a
reconsideration of the traditional interest of archival science in large organizations,
often government bureaucracies. Out of this reassessment, archival scholars have
become more open to non-bureaucratic environments of business and/or
knowledge production (Flinn, 2007; Flinn, 2008; Flinn, Stevens, Shepherd,
The new "contemporary archival diplomatics" advanced by the "InterPARES school"
has started to be challenged and expanded by bringing in lessons and perspectives
from outside the discipline. This process of "situating [diplomatics] within the
framework of other disciplinary and philosophical perspectives" (MacNeil, 2004,
p. 228) has led to rethink our conceptions of the other contexts of records as well.
Archival scholars have long known that the juridical-administrative context and the
procedural context can hardly be seen as separate, in that the former continually
impinges upon the latter, as changes in the legislation lead to changes in the
accepted administrative procedures. Recent explorations of scholarship concerning
organizations and organizational culture have provided archivists with new
conceptual and methodological tools to reimagine context.
The idea of a "network organization," for instance, with its ad hoc working groups
and teams that cross administrative units and professional boundaries for the
purpose of working collaboratively on particular projects, is characterized by a
flexibility that contrasts with the rigid bureaucracies that reigned supreme during
the period of development of modern archival science. Impermanency and fast
changing structures and functions have come to characterize the administrative
context of records. The procedural context cannot be seen as consisting exclusively
of official, written down or agreed upon rules and formalisms. Even in traditional,
mono-hierarchical, relatively static bureaucracies, it is often the case that the
attitudes and values of individuals or business units in an organization affect the
way procedures are executed. Scholars have started to study organizational
information cultures, the multilayered complex of attitudes, values, and tacit
behavioral norms regarding information that are at work in any given organization
and that influence the way records are created, kept, accessed, and used (Oliver,
2008; Oliver Foscarini, 2013).
The technological context has also been subject to profound reappraisal, in the light
of philosophical trends recognizing agency to technology and questioning
traditional subject-object positions (Orlikowski, 1992). Some archival scholars have
for instance adopted a structurational perspective, which has allowed them to
reframe the interrelationship between technology and the structural properties of
organizations. In line with this new way of conceiving agent-function-structure
relationships, the different layers of context identified within the traditional
archives in liquid times
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