20
A. 1. DIAMOND
In modern countries the development of intermediate records repositories has already come to be accepted as one of the normal functions of a government archive service and their management is becoming one of the specialised fields in archives administration.
Before leaving the subject of archives in general I should like to say something about what archivists do with archives once they are in their care. I am often asked about this, How do we organise them? Do we arrange them by subject or theme or what? How do we retrieve information from them?—and so on.
Well the first thing to point out is that archivists do not arrange archives at all, in the sense of reorganising them to suit some pre-conceived or ideal pattern. On the contrary, one of the archivist's chief concerns is to maintain them precisely in accordance with the scheme of classification which was imposed upon them by the office which created them. When a body of records is passed to an archive office one of the first things an archivist does is to examine it in order to discover how the records were classified and controlled by the office of origin. And having come to understand the system thoroughly the only re-arranging he may do will take the form of returning papers which are out of order to their proper places, and this he will do only after noting carefully, for the information of future users, that these items were found misplaced in such and such locations and have been returned to their correct positions.
Why this emphasis on original order? Well, you will recall that one of the attributes of archives which lends them their special evidential quality is the fact that they accumulated naturally. A body of archives acquires a kind of organic unity as it accumulates, rather like a growth of coral, and the relationships of papers in it can have significance in themselves and actually add meaning to each individual paper. This can be illustrated by considering an ordinary correspondence file. In its undisturbed entirety it may record the whole or part of some administrative transaction. It chronicles what happened, when and why; who said what to whom and for what reasons. In places it may be wrong in matters of fact or mistaken in the views it records. It may not say all that could have been said, and if it is like some government files it may say a good deal more than need have been said. But for all that it is the record; it is what passed among administrators themselves as an account of that particular piece of business and it served both to
20
A. 1. DIAMOND
In modern countries the development of intermediate records repositories has already come to be accepted as one of the normal functions of a government archive service and their management is becoming one of the specialised fields in archives administration.
Before leaving the subject of archives in general I should like to say something about what archivists do with archives once they are in their care. I am often asked about this, How do we organise them? Do we arrange them by subject or theme or what? How do we retrieve information from them?—and so on.
Well the first thing to point out is that archivists do not arrange archives at all, in the sense of reorganising them to suit some pre- conceived or ideal pattern. On the contrary, one of the archivist's chief concerns is to maintain them precisely in accordance with the scheme of classification which was imposed upon them by the office which created them. When a body of records is passed to an archive office one of the first things an archivist does it to examine it in order to discover how the records were classified and controlled by the office of origin. And having come to understand the system thoroughly the only re-arranging he may do will take the form of returning papers which are out of order to their proper places, and this he will do only after noting carefully, for the information of future users, that these items were found misplaced in such and such locations and have been returned to their correct positions.
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Why this emphasis on original order? Well, you will recall that one of the attributes of archives which lends them their special evidential quality is the fact that they accumulated naturally. A body of archives acquires a kind of organic unity as it accumulates. rather like a growth of coral, and the relationships of papers in it can have significance in themselves and actually add meaning to each individual paper. This can be illustrated by considering an ordinary correspondence file. In its undisturbed entirety it may record the whole or part of some administrative transaction. It chronicles what happened, when and why; who said what to whom and for what reasons. In places it may be wrong in matters of fact or mistaken in the views it records. It may not say all that could have been said, and if it is like some government files it may say a good deal more than need have been said. But for all that it is the record; it is what passed among administrators themselves as an account of that particular piece of business and it served both to
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