Principle Of Provenance Research Articles

The power of provenance in the records continuum

This paper explores the meaning of provenance in its broader social and organisational context, ambience, through a records continuum lens, bringing a reflexive and critical perspective to records continuum thinking over the past 30 or so years. It begins by introducing key recordkeeping concepts and goes on to explore records continuum theory and the records continuum model, a four-dimensional map of the recordkeeping and archival contexts of creation, capture, organisation and pluralisation. Continuum principles of provenance and ambience are situated in the model. An analysis of how provenance is currently narrowly applied in practice leads into an exploration of the power of ambience and provenance in the continuum. The following sections on Participatory Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care in Australia and Living Archives on Country illustrate how these concepts, together with those of multiple, simultaneous and parallel provenance, can be powerful tools in transforming the subjects of records into active recordkeeping agents. The illustrative examples relate to pioneering research on co-designing extensive suites of rights for co-creators of records who were previously relegated to the status of subjects of the record, and Indigenous archival sovereignty. They enable acknowledgement, enrichment, empowerment and coexistence of multiple, even contrary, positions, and provide frameworks for participatory recordkeeping and archiving.

A recontextualization of provenance: Records in Contexts and the principle of provenance

A recontextualization of provenance: Records in Contexts and the principle of provenance

The Season of Living Archives: a Generative Provenance

The contribution, starting from consolidated archival concepts, introduces the theme of living archives by evaluating their potential political role and the impact they can have on cultural and social dynamics. It also evaluates what the tools for contextualized use of these resources could be, also in light of a cross-action of the principles of provenance and relevance.

RANCANGAN PENATAAN ARSIP KARYA SENI PERTUNJUKAN UNTUK MENDUKUNG PENGEMBANGAN TRIDHARMA PERGURUAN TINGGI DI ISI SURAKARTA

This study aims to identify the types of art archives and arrange their arrangement designs in order to support the development of the tridharma of higher education at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) Surakarta. The archives studied are the archives of performing arts that are the result of the Tridharma organization. The research was conducted using a qualitative descriptive method. That is describing a situation based on the facts that appear. The results of field observations show that the performing arts document consists of text, audio, and video. Its creation cannot be separated from previous works of art as a reference or source of works of art. Artwork documents are archives because they are the result of the tridharma process, but have only been managed as a library. The archives are dominated by final works of art from study programs at the Faculty of Performing Arts, results of artistic research from the Research Centre, and results of community service works of art from the Centre for Community Service. ISI Surakarta Archives Retention Schedule stipulates the archive as a static archive (permanent) after the retention period expires. Its arrangement requires a design according to archival standards. The design is made by taking into account the principle of provenance and original order. The design includes archive creators, archive classification (final project reports, research, and community service), archive indexes (reports, audio visual recordings, and intellectual property certificates), archive cross-linking to link different types of archives for the same archive, information archives, access conditions and archive service procedures. Keywords: archive, arrangement, design, performing arts, tridharma

Taking stock of oral history archives in a village in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa: Are preservation and publishing feasible?

In South Africa, the way oral history archives of rural villagers are managed calls for attention as it can limit the inclusivity, visibility, accessibility and socio-economic development of rural communities, especially the younger generation. This article reports on a study that aimed to unpack some of the opportunities and challenges regarding the preservation and publishing of oral history archives faced by a village community in the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province. In addition, the study aimed to determine what the community knew about the South African legislative requirements regarding the management of oral history archives. The study adopted a qualitative research approach, grounded theory design and a constructivist paradigm. The postmodernist theory helped in gaining insight into how the principle of provenance is central when trying to understand the importance of inclusivity in the management of archives in this digital era. The 21st century is haunted by many socio-economic challenges such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), poverty, unemployment, inequality and social exclusion and giving space to the long-neglected oral history archives and counter archives or identity archives cannot be over-emphasised. In this context, such an initiative is viewed as critical in curbing the scourges of inequality, social exclusion and unemployment, particularly among the younger generation.Contribution: This article calls for the reimagining of the way oral history archives of a village are managed, preserved and published. In doing so, the use of a postmodernist approach and the provenance principle are viewed as critical in helping promote inclusivity and visibility of the long-neglected archives. The article argues that this approach may also help improve some of the socio-economic challenges faced by a village community when managing their oral history archives.

Kritická léta. Šedesátá léta v Archivu Národního muzea

The critical years. The nineteen sixties in the Archive of the National Museum The period of the nineteen sixties is a period of crucial endeavours by archivist Aleš Chalupa at the Archive of the National Museum. During this period he drew up a very interesting plan for documenting the present, which he also succeeded in implementing. But he also faced several serious crises. In relation to strict application of the principle of provenance in Czechoslovak archival science, there was a risk that the ANM would lose several rare resources, or rather its so-called Ancient collections. A competence dispute with another key institute, the Literary Archive of the Monument of National Literature, also erupted during this decade and, once again, the result was substantial depletion of the collections of the museum’s archive. Despite all these difficulties, A. Chalupa succeeded not only in defending the actual existence of the ANM itself, but even secured the status of Archive of Special Importance for it.

The principle of provenance as the principle of rationalization of archives

The subject of this article is to look at the emergence of the principle of provenance through the prism of the rationalization theories described by Max Weber and Karl Mannheim. Although this is not the first time the subject of the genesis of the principle of provenance and its importance for the development of archives is taken up, it is probably the first attempt to present this topic through the prism of sociological rationalization theories. This article also contributes to a further, broader look at archives through the prism of the macdonaldization theory described by Georg Ritzer, which is intended to show the development of archives in a globalizing world. One of the predecessors and pillars of macdonaldization is precisely bureaucracy. Such an approach allows the presentation of archives against the background of social changes taking place in the 20th and 21st centuries. The article is a theoretical study based on the analysis of the literature on the subject.

Ein neues Gedächtnis für die Verwaltung: born digitals und die Wissenschaft. Ein Tagungsbericht

Abstract The article reports on the workshop »born digitals und die historische Wissenschaft – Annäherungen an eine Quellenkunde für genuin elektronisches Archivmaterial«, which was organized by the State Archives of North Rhine-Westphalia in Duisburg on August 30th and 31st, 2022. The workshop established a dialogue between archivists and historians to address the epistemological, methodological, and technological challenges and opportunities of archiving and analyzing digital administrative records. The article situates these debates in a longer history of efforts to document administrative practices. Thus, the article highlights that the established archival order of written records was the contingent outcome of three interlinked transformation processes that occurred around 1900 in administrations and archives: 1) loose paper files started to replace records bound together in books transforming the file as the primary medium for documenting administrative practice, 2) the chronological organization of records in the registry gave way to an order based on subject categories, 3) archivists started to establish the principle of provenance as a principle of structuring archival collections. Thus, rather than treating digitalization as a crisis, it is seen as a transformative period of documentation practices, which brings its specific opportunities and challenges.

"The only way we knew how:" provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials.

Although much has been written on the archival principle of provenance and the centrality of records creation to archival practices and processes, there has been little exploration of how records creation is figured and enacted across specific archival sites and spaces. This article centers records creation in two digital archives of feminist materials: Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! Feminist Digital Archive with the aim of demonstrating records creation as an imaginative and fabulatory process of meaning-making. By decentering the notion of a singular, remarkable creator in favor of a multiplicity of creating contexts and actors, Rise Up! and Alternative Toronto enable imaginative acts of records creation that play with the spatial and temporal boundaries of records, pushing them into new, oftentimes unanticipated relationships to other records, users, and intervenors. In this article, I propose that provenancial fabulation can be characterized through four dimensions: first, it plays with contradictory records contexts putting them in conversation with one another; second, it troubles the order and organization of the past; third, it extends the temporal and spatial boundaries of historical records and accounts; and fourth, it acts infrastructurally to circulate ideas, imaginaries, narratives, and relationalities. In creating and configuring digital records according to feminist understandings of archival value and historical continuity, Alternative Toronto and Rise Up! demonstrate provenancial fabulation as a structuring force in the circulation of feminist knowledges and desires.

Provenienzprinzip und archivisches Denken

Abstract The following paper discusses the ‘principle of provenance’ as a fundamental concept of archival theory and practice. Whereas traditional archival practice follows an understanding of provenance as singular in origin, current discussions in the field of archival science open up this specific notion of provenance towards more complex forms of contextuality.

Archival Legacy of Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the National States

The article examines the consequences of the processes of disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and of making of national states for the archival heritage of the multiethnic empire of the Habsburgs. It is based on the provisions of the Saint-Germain and Trianon peace treaties concluded in 1919 and 1920 at Versailles concerning the intellectual and cultural heritage, as well as archival and published sources from Vienna and Budapest relating to the order of execution of these provisions. The victorious successor states that strove to divide the organically created archival heritage of the Monarchy and the funds of the Hungarian National Archives according to the territorial approach and ethnic principal, in order to satisfy the needs of national historiographies which needed additional resources for legitimisation of their independent statehoods. Both treaties provided for the application of the principle of provenance for the provision of archival services (or the transfer of documents), which were considered national intellectual property, but they did not provide a substantive explanation of these terms. Thus, this general regulation did not provide a solid legal basis for bilateral negotiations, so they were largely dependent on the balance of political power and economic considerations. From a historical perspective, the archival convention between Austria and Hungary turned out to be the most effective from a professional point of view, since in it the concept of national intellectual property, vaguely formulated in peace treaties, was not exclusively tied to the territory of a national state. In Austro-Hungarian relations, mutual recognition and use of the principle of common intellectual property allowed for cultural and academic interest in archival material outside its own territory, and at the same time guaranteed unrestricted access to information and the ability to influence the professional processing of archival material. The principles of the Baden Convention of 1926, progressive for their time, and the very adherence to its spirit, triumphed in international archival theory and practice in the 1960s as one of the possible models for resolving interstate archival disputes.

French archivists, the management of records and records management since the nineteenth century: are French recordkeeping tradition and practice incompatible with records management?

ABSTRACT French recordkeeping tradition and practice, gradually built up since the nineteenth century, are associated with the principle of provenance (respect des fonds) and with the life cycle approach (théorie des trois âges). The concept of records management seems at first glance unfamiliar to French archivists, as the difficulty of translating the term records into French would attest. This paper aims to study how and to what extent French archivists have taken into account the management of records in organisations since the French Revolution and to analyse how they have embraced the very concept of records management and got involved in the development and the implementation of the ISO 15489 standard. The study concludes that language and terminology issues, as well as training and cultural specificities have played a key role in the way French archivists have approached recordkeeping systems over time.

Megkésett tisztelgés vagy szakmai aktualitás? A levéltártan alapművének első magyar kiadásáról

The Dutch Manual of Muller, Feith and Fruin is the basic work of modern archival theory and practice and widely considered to be the “Bible of a modern archivist”. It was published the first time in Hungarian in 2019. Is it a late honour for the past of this profession with some significance just for archival history? How can the permanent influence of the book be explained? The principle of provenance has to be reconsidered at190any time when the archival profession faces new challenges. This study summarizes the most topical challenges of our times generally and for Hungarian archivists particularly to identify fields where the Manual seems to be highly inspiring in. We have to find new ways of arranging and representing archival information, and Dutch Manual seems to offer useful reference in the digital age too.

Associations Between the Principle of Provenance and Metadata: Practical Implementation and Cases

The principle of provenance is the fundamental theory of archives science, which also possesses important reference value in various areas of research and practice. This paper commences with investigating the core value of the principle of provenance, considering the principle to be the unity of theory and method and its core value lies in following historicalism and respecting essential attributes of the archives. Then the authors focus on the realm of government information management and explore the metadata implementation of the core value of the principle of provenance in the era of electronic records. In its essence, the principle of provenance requires full understanding and preservation of the source information of the record. In the age of electronic records this has ascended to the significance of obtaining information, which is often stabilized as metadata in electronic records, reflecting the process of the record’s creation, maintenance and long term preservation. Source information as the contextual information reflecting the record creation process, its typical form of expression in metadata is provenance metadata. Therefore the authors explore the implications of provenance metadata and its essential forms. The authors hold that source information is the indispensable characteristic information in records and archives, and also the essential form for the principle of provenance to exhibit the connotations of provenance. This paper also explains that provenance metadata has further realized the core value of the principle of provenance, playing important roles in ensuring the authenticity, integrity, reliability and usability of electronic records as well as being the basis of their long term preservation and usage. In addition, the authors make concrete exposition on the composition and function of provenance metadata, considering it to be composed of entities and elements, specifically including such metadata as institution, business, environment, relationship and time. Different provenance metadata entities and elements record the source information of the electronic record from its creation until transfer to archives, performing various important functions in government electronic record management. The authors further their research through analyzing and comparing the characteristics of provenance metadata in government electronic record metadata standards at international, national and local jurisdictions levels. Some feasible suggestions for future research are made in the conclusion.

Provenance as a Knowledge Organization Principle

The principle of provenance is one of the most important milestones in archival practice and theory from the time its establishment grounded the scientific dimension of archival discipline in the nineteenth century. Since then, provenance and document context have supported the organization of archival knowledge (especially through classification and description procedures). Such relationships were gradually refined over the years and from different experiences between European archives and their classification and ordering systems. Historically, the principle of provenance is a pivotal moment in the development of archival theory, crucial to understanding the nature of records and archives. However, in archival theory, the principle of provenance still does not correspond to a single term or a single definition and scarce normalization terminology remains one of the problems of archival science, which leads to a lack of consensus about the division between the two principles of provenance and original order. Recently, the concept of provenance has been addressed by many other disciplines (law, library and information science, computer science and visual analytics) and applied to different domains (cloud-based storage, preservation of digital records, digital evidence, digital humanities, e-science, open data, linked data, knowledge organization and indexing. As the use of provenance reaches new domains it is no longer just an organizing principle but also a means of reaching for authenticity and reliability of data and objects in digital environments or museums or to reestablish the original organic relationship in library collections.

Archival Knowledge: Conceptual Frameworks for Recent Terminology in the KO Domain

Despite having the principle of provenance as its guiding element, the archival knowledge organization still prescinds, for conceptual purposes, of greater clarity of its object-the archival knowledge-a fundamental aspect for the sedimentation of the archival studies and of its discursive community in the scope of KO. This article aims to define a conceptual framework to archival knowledge by using Dahlberg’s concept theory. In this vein, it established the nominal concept or definiendum-archival knowledge-seeking to analyze its real definition, composed by three inseparable definiens: the concept of fonds, the knowledge of documentary form and the knowledge of document creation context. At the end, it demonstrates that archival knowledge can be defined as being a reunion of three indivisible facets in which the archival bond will be contemplated.

Heritage and Repatriation in the History of Habsburg and Hungarian Archives

Hungary’s National Library and National Archives seek to collect, as exhaustively as possible, information sources defined as Hungarica: created by, or about, Hungary or Hungarians. Modern archival practice privileges the principle of provenance (the identity of the author or records creator) in determining what an archive should acquire. The Hungarian government’s Mikes Kelemen Program, founded in 2013, builds on earlier efforts for the acquisition of foreign Hungarica publications and manuscripts, defined by the Hungarian identity of the author. But because Hungarians living in the diaspora are not only Hungarian, sensitivity to the heritage and collecting interests of the diaspora host country is recommended.

A call to rethink archival creation: exploring types of creation in personal archives

The concept of creatorship is central to archival theory, as evidenced in archival description, which focuses on the relation of the material described to a single, named creator. Despite its centrality to the discipline and profession, the concept of archival creation is under-theorized and oversimplified. This article builds on recent discussion in the archival discipline regarding the need to expand the principle of provenance by exploring methods of archival creation in the archives of Canadian and American writers. It argues for a broader understanding of the types of agents and processes that create an archive over time and suggests that despite being centered on the concept of creation, the archival discipline has only begun to scratch the surface of the possibilities contained in it.

Records Group, problem zespołowości w archiwistyce amerykańskiej

The term record group means a group of fonds (records) and it is a type of archival fonds rarely described in Polish archival literature. Most often it is associated with the complex archival fonds, due to its comlicated structure and blurred borderlines – an effect of administrative system varying from the Polish one. The post-war attempts to modify and broaden the meaning of the complex fonds caused its resemblance to the term record group. Irena Radtke in her paper given during the 6th Archival Methods Conference in Warsaw in 1970 proposed, that the complex fonds should be one comprising records of foreign provenance that are an effect of passive succession. Bohdan Ryszewski, addressing Radtke’s idea, noticed that passive succession might be a source of complications. However, this conceptualization of the definition of the complex fonds did not correspond with the American understanding of it as an above-fonds structure.Bogdan Kroll has touched the core of the problem; he noticed that an archival construction comprising materials of various provenances cannot be seen neither as an archival fonds, nor as a complex fonds. He saw a discrepancy between the structure and partition of archival holdings and archival theory; thus Kroll proposed abandoning the term complex fonds and implementation of the term archival complex. The archival complex was supposed to be archival materials of various origins merged (in or outside of an archive) into fonds, or parts of archival fonds of different institutions having the same characteristic – function. The complex was supposed to make up a separate entity in logic structure of archival holdings, comprising of all archival fonds and/or their pieces being parts of the main fonds of the complex. The problem of lack of above-fonds forms in the Polish archival theory has been also noticed by Józef Siemieński, who has formulated the term of higher-order fonds. According to his idea the higher-order fonds was a fonds of archival fonds created by various authorities and agencies (in one system) that constituted separate hierarchy. In this article the Author used translation of the term record group into Polish grupa zespołów (akt). The term was defined in 1941 by Solon Justus Buck, in charge of the National Archives in Washington. The term record group was understood as a unit of logical division of archival holdings, set up in arbitrary way, which size and character was convenient for its processing and providing access to, while respecting the principle of provenance.

Problems with Describing E-born and Digitized Archival Records

National Program for Culture defines that the digitization and preservation of digital content in the field of culture, which include archives and libraries are among the basic tasks of public institutions dealing with cultural heritage. However, it would be reasonable to think how the digitization of library and archival material and free access to the online content are reflected in the description of digital content. Libraries and archives implemented in the last ten years various digitization projects. However, they did not pay attention to the description of digitized material, which raises the question of the importance of context. This raises also the question of the evidential value of the digitized archives as well as authenticity, integrity and accountability of the digitized material in a broader context, which archives provide on the basis of the principles of provenance and original order. The digitization of archives is not specific only from the standpoint of the digitization process itself but also from the standpoint of the description of digitized archives. Adequate description enables namely the wide use of digitized archival material. A short presentation of literature and up to now accomplished research is followed by an analysis of online accessible descriptions of digitized archival material. The analysis was conducted in 48 foreign archival information systems and their databases. These are large systems, some of which operate as a common database of several smaller archives, but some systems are individual systems of the large national archives. The analyses was conducted in publicly accessible user interfaces, and was based on a direct applicability of the descriptions of digitized archival material within individual database. This is the query that can be performed by average user of archival material with access to the search engine knowing at least the basics of the web browser and of searching and sorting of the results.