THE PAPER CHASE
21
remind them of what had happened in the past and to guide their actions in the future. Add to it or subtract from it a single attachment or minute and the record will not be quite the same. Its evidential quality will be impaired. Indeed whatever you add or subtract may have the effect of substantially altering, or even of obscuring altogether, the meaning or significance of other items in the file; or it may have the effect of reducing to nonsense actions taken or statements made in other related files. The whole file in this sense is more than the sum of its parts. And if you break up the file altogether and amalgamate its contents with those of other files to fit some ideal scheme of classification based on subject, theme or whatever, not only will the history of the transactions they recorded be lost, but very often the full meaning of the individual items as well.
Just as the full significance of individual papers in a file may be apparent only when they are considered in relation to the other papers in it, so the full significance of the file may emerge only when it is considered in the context of other files in the same or another file series.
So archivists are very much concerned with the provenance of papers; and not only with provenance but with what might be called the mechanical relationships of the units which comprise an archival assemblage.
The archives of any office arise solely in the service of its functions. Its registers, indexes, correspondence, journals, cash books, ledgers and the rest are component parts of the documentary mechanism by which the office operates. These components may arrive in an archive institution at different times and in varying states of repair and often in forms differing, through modification, from the original. The archivist's concern is to identify these parts as he receives them, discover how they relate to other parts, assemble them in their original order and get the mechanism back into working condition again.
In some archive institutions the component parts, or series as we call them, of archive groups are stored in the repositories in a manner which actually reflects physically, in so far as this is possible, their relationships to one another.
In broad terms this answers the question about how archivists organise their archives. It also goes some way towards explaining
THE PAPER CHASE
21
remind them of what had happened in the past and to guide their actions in the future. Add to it or subtract from it a single attach- ment or minute and the record will not be quite the same. Its evidential quality will be impaired. Indeed whatever you add or subtract may have the effect of substantially altering, or even of obscuring altogether, the meaning or significance of other items in the file; or it may have the effect of reducing to nonsense actions taken or statements made in other related files. The whole file in this sense is more than the sum of its parts. And if you break up the file altogether and amalgamate its contents with those of other files to fit some ideal scheme of classification based subject, theme or whatever, not only will the history of the transactions they re- corded be lost, but very often the full meaning of the individual items as well.
Just as the full significance of individual papers in a file may be apparent only when they are considered in relation to the other papers in it, so the full significance of the file may emerge only when it is considered in the context of other files in the same or another file series.
So archivists are very much concerned with the provenance of papers; and not only with provenance but with what might be call- ed the mechanical relationships of the units which comprise an archival assemblage.
The archives of any office arise solely in the service of its func- tions. Its registers, indexes, correspondence, journals, cash books, ledgers and the rest are component parts of the documentary me- chanism by which the office operates. These components may arrive in an archive institution at different times and in varying states of repair and often in forms differing, through modification, from the original. The archivist's concern is to identify these parts as he receives them, discover how they relate to other parts, assemble them in their original order and get the mechanism back into work- ing condition again.
In some archive institutions the component parts, or series as we call them, of archive groups are stored in the repositories in a manner which actually reflects physically, in so far as this is pos- sible, their relationships to one another.
In broad terms this answers the question about how archivists organise their archives. It also goes some way towards explaining
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.