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E-mail ketelaar@uva.nl |
What is archivistics or archival science?
Archival science is a science in the European sense of
Wissenschaft. To avoid, however, confusion with the natural sciences in the
Anglo-Saxon meaning, I personally use the term archivistics, being the
equivalent to the Dutch archivistiek, the German Archivistik, the
French archivistique, the Italian and Spanish archivistica
Records are always created and used on account of
work-processes and actions that give the archives their context and structure.
These elements determine the form of the documents. Archivistics focuses itself
on context, structure, and form as determined by these processes and not on the
contents of the document.
Archivistics is concerned with basic questions as:
what makes a society or an organization create and maintain records and
archives the way it does and will a better understanding of the way people in
organizations create and maintain records and archives enable us to make
statements about an efficient and effective way of creating records?1
We therefore look at societies, organizations and people that create archives.
This, I have named social and cultural archivistics. Its object is the
continuum of records creation, processing, and use.
Traditionally, the object of archival science was the
body of archives once they had crossed the threshold of the repository. The
archivist used to be a mere custodian or keeper, at the receiving end,
dependent upon what the administration had created and passed on.
But recently the archivist's focus has shifted from
the inactive stage of the life of recorded information to the front-end of the
records continuum. There, he or she has a contribution to make even before
documents are captured by a record-keeping system. To be able to develop the
information strategy and the record-keeping system of an organization, the
archivistics professional has to understand the way people create and maintain
records and archives. To arrive at such an understanding, one should also take
into account the stage that precedes archiving. That is what I have called
recently: archivalization - the conscious or unconscious choice
Archiving and archivalization are influenced by
social, religious, cultural, political and economic contexts. These may vary in
any given time and in any given place. That challenges archivistics to be a
comparative science.3 Comparative archivistics is more than treating
and teaching a subject from an international and multicultural perspective,
since it asks for ethnography followed by ethnology, for 'what' followed by
'why'. Comparative research should be carried out in the present,
cross-cultural and cross-societal, but also in the past.
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1 Frank G. Burke, The future course of archival theory in the
2 F.C.J. Ketelaar, Archivalisering
en archivering. Rede uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van
hoogleraar in de archiefwetenschap aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op vrijdag
23 oktober 1998
3 Eric Ketelaar, The difference best postponed? Cultures and comparative
archival science, Archivaria 44