Luciana Duranti
The verb ‘to archive’, contrary to what many believe, does not find its origin in archival science but in data management, in the context of which it means moving data from a high-cost primary storage to a low-cost high-capacity storage for long-term retention. However, starting in the 1990s, when electronic records began to replace paper records on a large scale, the verb ‘to archive’ used by computer scientists to refer to saving the records to a system began to become popular in the world of archives to refer to two distinct ideas: the idea of transfer of organizational records to an archival repository for long-term preservation, and the idea of creating accumulations of documentary materials related to people’s lives or social events. Both ideas are part of much broader activities, respectively, permanent preservation for cultural or evidentiary purposes of the records produced by public and private bodies in the course of their activities, and documentation of society. Both ideas involve research, though not necessarily the same research methods.
Permanent preservation of the written record of society is the realm of archival science, a field of knowledge that originated as an autonomous discipline in Europe in the sixteenth century but whose practices are rooted in the Sumerian culture and whose body of concepts goes back to Roman law. Though the word ‘archives’ derives from the Greek ἀρχεῖον (arkheion), meaning public records, or office of chief magistrates, ἀρχή (arkhē) (from the verb ἄρχω (arkhō), to rule, to govern), it is referred to in the Justinian Code as locus publicus in quo instrumenta deponuntur (the public place where deeds are deposited), quatenus incorrupta maneant (so that they remain uncorrupted), fidem faciant (provide trustworthy evidence), and perpetua rei memoria sit (be continuing memory of that to which they attest). In the ancient world, an archives (note that in UK English the term is singular, while in North American English it is plural) was a place of preservation under the jurisdiction of a public authority. This public place endowed the documents that passed its threshold with trustworthiness, thereby giving them the capacity of serving as evidence and continuing memory of facts and acts. Over the centuries, archives have acquired additional functions, among which is that of preserving the records of society at large, including those of individuals and private organizations; and they have taken different shape and forms, as national institutions have been joined by archives of lower administrations (for example, state, region, city, province), and business archives (for example, banks, industries, legal firms, insurances) have become as rich and complex as those of universities, churches and other traditional institutions. As a consequence, the body of knowledge that governed the archival field grew as well and, from a primarily legal and historical discipline, became a science.
The archival discipline, Trevor Livelton writes, ‘denotes a form of study with a distinct methodology used to gain knowledge. A discipline encompasses both a way of gaining knowledge – rules of procedure that discipline the scholar’s search – and the resulting knowledge itself’ (Livelton 1996: 44). Archival science can be regarded as a system inclusive of theory, methodology, practice and scholarship, which owes its integrity to its logical cohesion and to the existence of a clear purpose that rules it from the outside, determining the boundaries in which the system is designed to operate. Archival theory – the whole of the ideas about what archives are, and archival methodology – the whole of the ideas about how to treat them, govern the entire system of archival science. Thus, archival methodology controls the practice and scholarship of permanent preservation on the basis of the fundamental concepts of archival theory, which include: (a) archives hold in trust the archival documents of society and guarantee their continuing reliability as witnesses of action; (b) archival material is the natural, authentic, impartial, interrelated and unique by-product of human activities; (c) antiquity provides archival documents with the highest authority; and (d) unbroken custody ensures documents’ authenticity. As a consequence, archival methodology has been based on the ideas of respect for context, provenance, relationships, order, structure and form.
Archival methodology encompasses several functions, all of which aim to achieve the permanent preservation of an authentic record of society. They are commonly identified as Appraisal (for Selection and Acquisition), Arrangement and Description, Retention and Preservation (this function specifically deals with the physical and technological stabilization of the material and protection of its intellectual content), Management and Administration, and Reference and Access. With the advent of the digital era, permanent preservation has acquired an additional key function, that of Control on Records Creation and Maintenance. ‘Preservation starts at creation’ is the motto of modern day digital archivists. The fulfilment of each and every one of these functions requires research, which is carried out using the archival method. In this context, it can be stated that ‘archiving’ is the use of the archival method to ensure the permanent preservation of the world documentary heritage.
The archival method is a sort of meta-methodology governing all methods used to carry out the archival functions mentioned above. It was developed by borrowing from different fields, thus, it is from its origin interdisciplinary: the nineteenth-century debate between historians and archivists led to the affirmation of the historical method of analysis for arrangement and description; the twentieth-century strong relationship between archival and library science affected the conduct of research on retrieval and access; the introduction of mechanization in public administration changed the method for the development of documentation processes and workflows; the twenty-first-century alliance with information science added understanding of a new technological context to the research on digital records preservation; social sciences methods have guided the questioning of user behaviours, creators’ processes, and archival policies; and post-modernism has spurred debates about archival identity and purposes of appraisal.
Regardless, at the core of ‘archiving’ is the belief held by archivists that the subject of their research is not determined by personal interest, but by the nature of the material for which they are responsible, the archival institution’s or programme’s acquisition and description priorities, and the needs of the many services archivists carry out to support the work of both records creators and records users. For this reason, archivists, in fulfilling their professional functions, cast their research questions in a juridical and administrative as well as an historical framework. They analyse ‘the phenomena and structure of records and record aggregations, which are not examined for their content, but for the meaning of their characteristics, form, organization, and administrative, functional, procedural and documentary context, as archival theory dictates’. ‘Research guided by the archival method is inferential in nature, because it occurs within the interpretive framework of archival theory, according to which proof, truth, and evidence are extra-textual’ (Duranti and Michetti 2016: 88, 90).
Thus, although archival science is nourished by methodologies from other fields, ‘in a process that continuously broadens and refines its core without altering it’, such methodologies are used to foster useful transfers to the archival field ‘in emerging areas of endeavor and investigation, to eliminate the duplication of theoretical efforts in different fields, and to promote consistency of scientific knowledge’ (Duranti and Michetti 2016: 83). However, when archivists use other methodologies, they confront them with archival theory, methods, practice and scholarship,
subject them to a feedback process, and insert them into the fundamental structure of the system. Only in this way will they be able to maintain the integrity and continuity of their discipline while at the same time fostering its enrichment and growth [through an interdisciplinary process of borrowing from other disciplines and assimilating their concepts and methods], integrity and continuity that are vital to their ability to preserve all records, regardless of medium.
Duranti and Michetti 2016: 83
And this archival belief in the need to maintain the integrity of the archival discipline (Duranti 1994) leads to a brief discussion of the other idea linked to the term ‘archiving’, that of documenting society.
For about three decades now, archivists and researchers, primarily in North America and the UK, have been lamenting the absence from the holdings of archives of the personal documents of individuals and minorities, as well as documentation of events of historical impact from a nongovernmental perspective. The term ‘silence’ has been used many times in relation to the voices of marginalized groups and peoples, and filling such silence with those voices has been one of the major endeavours of several archival institutions as well as of a substantial component of the archival profession, to the point that the traditional view of the archivist as an objective and impartial professional conducting research that supports the control, understanding, preservation and dissemination of the existing records rather than anyone’s specific interest has begun to be regarded as negative.
This is not the place for a discussion of the role of archival institutions and archivists in society, as the focus of this essay is on the ‘archiving method’. But, if archiving is documenting society, what is the method for documenting society? Certainly, there has to be a method for deciding what deserves to be documented and where, and then a variety of methods for documenting the chosen subject, depending on whether written documents about it exist, who holds them, etc. Clearly, each topic, in each context, and for each purpose will require a different methodology, or a combination of methodologies, which is impossible to envision a priori.
Many archival authors have written about the development of documentation strategies and plans without ever converging on one ‘archiving’ approach (see the many entries on these matters in Duranti and Franks (2015)), and archivists are increasingly faced with the challenge of ‘de-colonizing’ archives by freeing archiving from the imperfections (and perfections) of our established models and practices in relation to what we see in the real world. Digital technologies are both fuelling the need for change and providing the principal means of effecting change, but the new generation of archivists still maintains that decolonization is fundamentally about attitudes and ideas, both technical and social, as new technologies are themselves historically and culturally contingent. They clearly see the need for a new approach to archiving, one based on activism, plurality and social responsibility (see, for example, Archivaria 80).
The term ‘archiving’ is today commonly used to refer to two different ideas: permanently preserving the records of our society and documenting society. Though both ideas relate to the formation of a documentary heritage and the protection of the sources for historical memory, they differ in that the former derives from a juridical and administrative obligation to accountability, transparency, and proof, while the latter results from a social need to understand and preserve cultural identity. As a consequence, archiving intended as permanent preservation is highly regulated by a discipline, archival science, developed through several millennia and universal in nature, regardless of technological changes, while archiving intended as documentation of society is highly contextualized, based on the needs of specific groups and peoples, as well as their traditions and beliefs, and variously enabled by technological developments. Most recently, both ideas have been challenged as entrenched in a ‘colonial’ mindset, and a third idea of archiving is surfacing, one that, regarding as creators and owners of archives those about whom the documents talk, gives them the right to decide what information will be documented, retained, preserved and made accessible, how, and where. No methodology has been developed yet to carry out this third idea of archiving, but it is very likely that, being culturally motivated, it will be highly interdisciplinary.
Archivaria 80 (2015). http://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/issue/view/463
Duranti, L. (1994). The concept of appraisal and archival theory. American Archivist, 57(Spring): 328–345.
Duranti, L. and Franks, P. (Eds.) (2015). Encyclopedia of Archival Science. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Charles Harmon, Executive Editor.
Duranti, L. and Michetti, G. (2016). The archival method: rediscovering a research tradition. In A. J. Gilliland, S. McKemmish and A. Lau (Eds.) Research in the Archival Multiverse (pp. 74–95). Melbourne: Monash Publishing.
Justinian (529–565). Corpus Juris Civilis, Novella 15 ‘De Defensoribus civitatum’, ‘Et a defensoribus’, Digestum48, no. 19 ‘De Poenis’, Codex I, no. 4 ‘De episcopali audientia’.
Livelton, T. (1996). Archival Theory, Records, and the Public. Lanham, MD and London: The Society of American Archivists and The Scarecrow Press, Inc.